


Every Atom of me in Magnificent Glow

by privatepenne



Category: Godzilla (2014)
Genre: Alien Biology, KotM canon compliant so far, Rodan and Ghidorah hooked up and now rodan's Single Dadding their dumbass kid, Spoilers for KOTM, past Ghidorah/Rodan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-05-16 18:30:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 45,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19323703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/privatepenne/pseuds/privatepenne
Summary: King Ghidorah is dead, and King Ghidorah lives on.  In his brief time in the contemporary world he left behind a piece of himself, to the bafflement of xenobiologists and titans everywhere.





	1. Chapter 1

“What kind of display is that?” Dr. Chen asked, her eyes fixed on the screen. “It looks like a dominance display, but it lacks the secondary aggressive signs. Look-“ she dragged her fingers across the touchscreen monitor, expanding their view of one golden eye. “The pupils are dilated. Relaxed.”

“His vitals are within normal limits. It looks like you’re right,” one of the other behavioral xenobiologists, Dr. Schultz, agreed. “But that still begs the question of what exactly he’s doing.”

“I think he’s showing off,” Madison said.

Officer Barnes, now Colonel Barns, laughed a little. “Yeah, like a guy at the gym, right? He’s flexing?”

“I’ve seen enough teenagers in high school to know how they act,” Madison continued, picking her fingernail and raising her eyebrows. “He’s still just a teenager by titan standards and there’s nobody else around to show off for, so I think – he’s trying to get our attention.”

Dr.s Chen and Schultz looked at each other, then back to the monitor.

There wasn’t a lot of Isla de Mara to salvage after the second Titan Event, but following Rodan’s return to his ancestral nest, Monarch had spent the last five years assembling an observation station out of the rubble to keep an eye on him. The citizens and the government helping them rebuild trickled back in to clean up the debris and set up, but nobody seemed particularly eager to move back under the domain of the unpredictable pteradon. 

And for the past three years, the Isla de Mara outpost had been ground zero for the newest titanic phenomena to shake the scientific establishment. Not that there wasn’t an embarrassment of riches for people who were less concerned about collateral damage than scientific inquiry, but this had really blown away discourse about the taxonomic classification of the North American titans, or the nitrogen-fixing qualities of their dung.

Three years ago the volcano at Isla de Mara, previously the throne of one chastened, sulking former fire-demon, also became a titan nursery.

The grainy drone footage overturned everything they’d thought – assumed – about titan reproduction up to that point. Not that they knew much at all, but they’d extrapolated from the general lack of external genitalia or mating rituals that titans reproduced asexually. Some kind of parthogenesis. It made sense, given the diversity of titan species but the dearth of specific kaiju that were genetically similar enough to produce viable offspring among each other. It wouldn’t have been so surprising of the hatchling, wings still soggy from amniotic fluid, poking over the lip of the smoldering volcano, looked like Rodan. The titan was awake and, as such, had self-reproduced and made a fiery clone. That would make perfect sense.

The hatchling’s second head, however, made that a difficult argument to make.

Anyways, back to the present.

“Interesting,” Dr. Chen said, studying the clip with renewed interest. “Daophin has never showed particular interest in humans before. Perhaps his newly discovered self-propelled flight has made him bolder...”

“Let’s hope he’s not too bold,” Dr. Schultz added. “Don’t want him to end up like daddy dearest.”

“Ah, yeah, but Godzilla took Ghidorah down one time, and the kid’s only half the monster he was,” Colonel Barns responded. “Took out Boston, though.”

Madison watched the clip replay from her perch on the desk on the far side of the lab as the two scientists and the token army rep talked. She didn’t like to think too hard about Boston, tried to put it into a little box in her mind and shove it somewhere deep down, and in the meantime she could channel her fixation on titans on something more acceptable. Summer internships with Monarch, for instance, where she was treated as a semi-celebrity for her scientific pedigree and her first-personal encounter with Titan 0. Entymological research, Chinese language classes, catching up on Netflix.

The copper titan, still small in its adolescence, reared up on his hind legs, enormous wings cresting above his head. Reminiscent of Ghidorah, silhouetted across an ochre stormcloud. One serpentine head was bobbing up and down at the camera, the other tilted back, emitting short, throaty chirps. He sounded more like a zoo seal asking for fish than the Son of Ghidorah, a false Dauphin to the throne of their world. I hope you don’t try anything smart, she thought. She thought, suddenly and a little sadly, of Andrew in his bear costume, arms and smile wide as he leapt onto dad’s back.

He was just a kid. He – Jesus, now at 17 she realized that they’d both just been kids back then. No child deserved to have something like that happen to them. No kid should have to make the choices that she had.

The adults were talking about the mechanics of an oxygen bomb on a half-Terran, half-extraterrestrial titan. The lightness of their tone said that they didn’t expect it to be a problem just yet, but something in Dr. Chen’s furrowed brow and Colonel Barnes’ acute interest spoke that they wanted to know, just in case, that it was important that they knew how to kill the adolescent titan if they needed to.

Don’t try anything smart, Daophin, she thought. We killed one of you before. We don’t want to do it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Real short chapter, IK! Next chapter will be the titanic perspective.


	2. Chapter 2

 

He had been so excited about the flying that he couldn’t stay in their home for long afterwards. How could he stay in that tight-walled pit, blistering rock-wet, sooty? There was a world outside that was cool and crisp in his throats that he had never thought of, only seen snatches of, before he knew the world came in colors that weren’t orange and coalblack? 

His progenitor was the King of the Mountain and the ruler of everything that he could cast his eyes over, and he had said as much, and had shown him as much, by flying the borders of it with every rise and set of the sun. Daophin could see him as a smudge on the horizon, tracing a path on the ground below that Daophin could not see. When he returned from his perambulations he smelled fresh and like ozone and was not as warm and stiff as he had been before.

 _Once you can hold your place in the sky you’ll find your own nest to protect_ , his progenitor had said.

He hadn’t seen what was wrong with their nest, but he wasn’t unhappy with being told that he’d one day leave it. It was deep and dark, except for the fissures of oozing brilliant rock-wet that disgorged mouthfuls of fiery syrup down the walls. It was warm and close. It reeked of sulfur. It was the only thing he’d ever known. Every day his progenitor left and he couldn’t do anything but watch him hurl his immense, awesome frame out through the bright hole above them, and marvel.

Daophin would amuse himself with stacking rocks, unstacking rocks, kicking rocks, licking rocks and once, and only once, licking the glowing wet-rock coming from the walls. Progenitor hadn’t liked that at all, he’d laughed at him and his mouth had been sore for a long time afterwards.

He’d eaten the thin walls of the rock that he’d come from, the leathery sac from around him. His progenitor had told him to, even though his wetling mouths were almost too soft for it and even though he was too young to understand what he was doing. He’d swallowed the pieces and they’d hurt his necks but it made his progenitor happy, satisfying some internal imperative. It seemed like a waste to have mouths and not use them. _What are we supposed to do with them?_ He’d whined. _I can’t put rocks in them and so many things hurt my tongues._ His progenitor had given him an inscrutable Look and told him that _he’d find out, when the time came,_ _what teeth were used for._ He said that about a lot of things.

Even Daophin knew what wings were for, though. He watched his progenitor fly every day, his huge wings looking like tears ripped in the blinding white sky. Long, pointed, jagged at the margins and hissing red like wet-rock. They were every beautiful thing, and his progenitor was very proud of them. Sometimes he let Daophin preen him, strafing off the dead scales to reveal orange-red burning underneath. He loved his place there held between his progenitor’s chest and wing like a second, smaller nest, where he could hear his deep inspiration and heartbeat and feel the immense strength of the sinews undergirding his wings. When he was a wetling his progenitor had kept him there all the time, but now he was too big, and was only allowed to curl up there when he was cleaning his wings.

 _Will mine look like that?_ He asked, when his own wings were still crumpled and folded against his arms. Ugly, stubby little things.

 _No,_ his progenitor said shortly. _Yours will be bigger._

  _When?_

  _When they need to be, now go to sleep._

 Maybe one day his progenitor would preen his wings for him, Daophin had thought. Maybe his wings would burn without being consumed, destruction lying fleshclose to muscle and skin.

 Over days and weeks they had gotten suppler and started unfolding themselves. They itched, so painfully sometimes that he cried out in misery and his progenitor made him stretch them out to keep them from chafing. When he was gone on his flights Daophin would sometimes crawl up out of their nest to stretch them out over the lip of their nest to feel the cool air soothe them. He liked to watch the world from there, the brightness hurting his eyes but the unfamiliar colors tempted him to keep staring. He could sometimes see his progenitor when the sky was clear, making his usual arc, a scatter of red light from his immense wings in the distance.

 It was nice that his own wings didn’t hurt so badly anymore when he got older, but the real excitement came from knowing that soon – one day soon - he would be hurling himself out of their furnace nest too. He’d had no sense of how old he was, or even that age existed as a concept. He was smaller than his progenitor but not so small that he could be carried by the scruff of his necks like when he was a wetling.

 His progenitor had promised that he would show Daophin how to fly as soon as his wings were strong and open enough, and the day that he deemed him worthy was the best day of his young life. He had seen the outside world from his perch on their nest but there was some call, deep down in his belly, that told him that looking was not enough.

 They had perched at the rim of their nest together, Daophin clutching the rim, tense, and his progenitor with his enormous wings folded and draped around him. The sun was barely scraping above the horizon and his progenitor was thrown into sharp relief in the yellow light, all angles and handsome, powerful profile. Daophin felt a swell of pride knowing that he’d look like that some day. He wondered when he would start to burn and glow like him, but he didn’t dare ask.  He hoped that he got to keep both of his heads.

  _The movement comes from the shoulders_ , his progenitor had said. _It looks like the wings are doing the work, but the shoulders and the chest are where the actual power comes from. You have to keep your wings loose so they have some give. If it’s easier you can kick off with your legs, but it’s very inelegant and you’d do better if you learned how to take off without a running start from the beginning. You’ll get made fun of otherwise. Keep your eyes up in the direction that you’re going and don’t look down until you’re in the air._

 Daophin nodded like he knew what he was talking about.

 His progenitor looked out. _Like this,_ he said, and Daophin ducked to avoid a wing as he crouched, coiled, and then unfurled, muscles and wings rippling, blasting enough air downwards to knock Daophin off his feet.

 He looked up and watched his progenitor rise and hover. He was looking down at him expectantly. Oh, so now it was his turn? He really didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that. He stood back up, tried to balance at the rim of the nest and crouched down, eyes up and heads bobbing. Don’t look down until you’re in the air. Eyes up. Will get made fun of. He adjusted himself and slammed his feet downwards as hard as he could, snapping his wings open and flapping so hard that the joints of his shoulders cracked.

 The ground left him and he was in the air! The sky was dizzying above him but he was going there! Somewhere in his peripheral consciousness he heard someone screaming and he thought it might be him, but it was hard to tell. He was lifting up, up – and – his wings were losing purchase, air slipping out beside them instead of pillowing under them, he was going down, he was losing his grip, he was – oh, he was going down again. Oh that wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

 He crashed back down, chest first, skidding down the rocky side of the mountain before he caught himself.

 He’d fallen down into the cave from the entrance a few times but he’d been alone then and could lick his wounds in private. This hurt just as bad, but even worse for having an audience.

 He groaned, daring to look down. His legs, one, two, both accounted for, even though they hurt. His chest stung and he could see that a layer of nest soot had been scraped aside, leaving slashes of glimmering orange scales underneath that momentarily transfixed him.

 The beating of enormous wings overhead, and the sound of something setting down beside him. Oh, no. He splayed his wings over his own heads, feeling hot shame creep up his necks. His progenitor was... laughing? Or maybe it was the rustling of his wings that he was hearing. He hoped so.

  _Come on,_ he said. _Nobody gets it right on the first try. Let me see_ – an immense wing pushed his own aside so Daophin had to peer out from under them, heads looped down in embarrassment. The sky seemed very far away from down here. His progenitor cocked his head at him, examining him with one golden eye. W _hen I was a fledgling I didn’t even get a chance to try, I just got pushed out of the nest when I was big enough. Fly or fall, thunk. You hurt?_ He asked.

 Daophin shook one of his heads miserably.

  _Yeah, when you take off you don’t just flap up and down, you have to_ – he opened his wings and slowly demonstrated the three-dimensional movement that he meant – _spin your wings to get vertical lift, to make sure that you’re always perpendicular to the air. That’s why kicking off helps at first, before you learn how to do it right away. Once you’re up there, you can just flap, but you won’t get off the ground like that. Come on, try it. There’s a good fledge. Up on your legs._

 A buzzing sound caught Daophin’s attention as he tried to copy what his progenitor was doing, and he zeroed in on one of the little fly-things above them. He saw them from the nest sometimes, little black buzzing creatures that passed by or circled them, but they rarely came close. His progenitor looked, too, then back to him dismissively.

  _Don’t worry about that, it’s just the humans._

_I thought the humans were… smaller? Those little specks down there._

  _They are, but they have these metal birds they can ride in. Not real creatures like us, of course, just shells. Don’t antagonize them if you can help it, they’re really annoying. Sometimes they hit you with things._

_What kind of things? Why would they want to hit us?_

  _Well, they’re envious of us, obviously. They try to copy us. We can fly, so they try to fly, too. We can rain fire from the heavens, so they try to make their own fire to use to hurt us. They even make nests,_ his progenitor said, gesturing down to the human-place beyond. _It’s a sad mockery of what we can do._

 Daophin huffed. _They can’t be blamed_ , he said. _Who wouldn’t want to be us?_

 The fly-thing buzzed around, keeping a safe distance as it circled their mountain. His progenitor biffed him lightly on a head. _Don’t worry about that, try flying again. Remember that your power comes from your chest. Keep your wing-tips loose. Head up. Er, heads up._

 He stepped back. Daophin’s knees hurt and his shoulders were sore to move but he hunkered down; he coiled his legs under him, rocks skittering down below; he loaded his wings against his chest; he tried again.

 

* * *

 

 It took him several more tries. His progenitor lost his patience after the third time he fell and told him that he was going to patrol the rest of the island, and to practice for a little while on his own on the side of the mountain. _Watch out for the flying humans and don’t land on your wings, if they get broken they’ll never heal right._ The thought had nearly scared Daophin into not trying again, but watching his progenitor disappear into the horizon, powerful wings snapping, he knew he had to anyway.

 He was sore all over now. One of the falls had trapped his neck between his body and the black rocks below and hurt terribly when he turned that head outwards. He whimpered, stretching it this way and that, trying to work it out.

 The human flying-thing was still overhead. It buzzed distantly. He was more irritated by the thought of someone seeing him try and fail over and over again than by its presence itself. He didn’t care about what humans did as long as they didn’t bother him.

 He grumbled and shuffled, getting his feet in the right position. This time he would focus more on keeping his wings loose and giving. He’d tried to churn the air like his progenitor but he couldn’t make his bones work like his; they were too stiff. The skin of the wings were too taut and leathery. Getting into the air with legpower was possible, but staying in the air was the issue. His body was off balance, when he tried to hover like his progenitor did the weight of his heads would topple him forward, and if he leaned back to counterbalance them then he couldn’t angle his wings horizontally.

 Even worse he’d land on his back then, precariously close to crunching a soft-nascent wing underneath. The thought made him want to gag.

 The buzzing of the flying-thing caught his attention again. Nasty little thing, breaking his concentration. It didn’t even have a proper head. If the humans wanted to build a facsimile of him, it needed at least two.

 Then again, he cocked his head, the flying-thing didn’t look anything like his progenitor, either. The human wings were stiff and brittle without any of the whiplike give of his progenitor’s. They were locked into place.   When it turned, it angled its whole body instead of using its wings to guide its direction.

 How did those things go from the ground to the air? They had to get back to land somehow, unless the humans gave themselves wings, and if they did then they wouldn’t need to build a bigger shell. Looking down at the human nests below he squinted and tried to remember what he’d seen before. They had some running-off path, he thought, where they gathered speed, and then they just… went up, somehow. Looking up he saw his progenitor, barely visible in the mid-day sky, probably too far away to see him. The humans didn’t know that it was inelegant to get a running start, did they? He doubted that they were smart enough. Besides, they needed one, too.

 Kneading the ground underneath for purchase and comfort, he looked down the side of their mountain. Craggy and sungold, dropping precipitously a few wingspans away from him. Daophin crouched, leaning on his legs, wings skinclose to his body. If he fell now he would go directly down the mountain, tumbling down like a rockslide all the way to the bottom, maybe down into the human nestlands. If he didn’t, though, he would glide.

 Before he had a chance to second guess himself he sprang forward down the slope, legs first and then wingclaws, one, two three lunges, picking up speed, tipping forwards and down and as soon as the rocks dropped away beneath him he splayed up as hard as he could and pushed his wings out.

 And he stayed up.

 He was screeching again but he wasn’t falling. Instead, the world was unrolling beneath him as he rose at a gentle angle to the horizon. He dared flap once, then, buoyed by success, once more, and he surged upwards even faster. The sky above him was bright and clear blue and the cool wind was whipping past him, lighting every nerve in his body with cool sparks of pleasure. He hadn’t ever appreciated how hot and stifling his nest was before, how wetclose, compared to the sky like this.

 Shoulders singing with painful exertion he climbed higher. He looked like a fool, he knew, with his jerky wingbeats and his toolong necks bobbing, but he ignored that for now, taken with the exhilaration. _Look at me!_ He screeched dual-tone to the world in joyous exultation. _I did it!_ Chest full to bursting with power, relief and delight.

  _I’m ready to join you!_

 

* * *

 

In the Monarch outpost, a grim-faced biostatistician upgraded Titanus Dauphinius' threat level.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rodad's trying his best. At least he's, like, there, lmfao.  
> Im so glad you all like it so far T_T I don't know how often this'll update.. maybe once a plot appears... until then enjoy Daophin doing his best.  
> Next chapter: Maybe a Rodan flashback, maybe Daophin making friends and finding shiny things to hoard.


	3. Chapter 3

Rodan, frankly, never considered himself the paternal type.

When he’d had the egg, the process was as torturous as it was unexpected (he’d assumed the discomfort and soreness was his body trying to knit itself together after Mothra stabbed him. The sheer audacity!)

 Afterwards, he was at a loss for what to do with it. After the battle of Kings the rest of the titans had gone their own way, dispersed again, and that suited Rodan fine. He needed privacy to lick his wounds, both to his body and to his ego. He was still reeling from the novelty of being awake and from his first violent encounter with the rest of the titans in this new world. Smarting from the loss of his Alpha.

 And then, if that wasn't enough, without any prior warning except the biological imperative to find a nest, he was suddenly thrust into paternity.

 Nobody prepared you for what to do with an egg. His progenitors definitely didn’t stick around for long enough to tell him what to do with one. They left him only a few memories of them, looming over him in the sunbaked desert he’d hatched in. He didn’t even know if a burnt-out volcano was a good place to lay it, or if the trickles of magma that remained after the eruption would broil it while it lay in its shell. Rodan preferred the heat, and Ghidorah was apparently able to countenance sitting his big tails on it, so he hoped that the fledgling would be alright down there too. If not, he’d break a big rotten egg over the human encampments and make a day of it.

 While the humans trickled in below, Rodan waited. The battle wounds ached and stung when he tried to move, so he didn’t. Mostly he slept, the oblong slate-grey egg hidden underneath his belly like an island in the center of a red pteradon whirlpool. Sometimes he would hear something at the fringes of his consciousness that sounded like other titans, calling for him from far away, but he tried not to listen to their intransigent pull. He deserved to rest. He needed – if asked for an excuse – to protect his egg.

 Like most titans, he didn’t need to feed on anything except ambient energy. The heat from the caldera worked perfectly; it sank into his skin, down to his bones, into every vein and scale that had been chilled and broken. The egg was warm, too, pulsing intermittently with heat. As the creature inside grew it started to glow a little from the inside, revealing the shadow of veins underneath the surface.

 Part of him wondered what they would look like, the fledgling. Part of him was terrified to know the answer.

 The Alpha that had been his sire had been on Earth with him for less than a day. One crossing of the sun over the sky and then under again and he was gone, charred and melted into the Earth that Rodan broke out of. He’d had only gotten a glimpse of it, smoldering and almost indiscernible from the wreckage of the rest of humanity’s detritus. He’d looked away.

 He wanted to remember the King, the Alpha, like he was in life.

 Cataclysm in a physical form. Indomitable and inexorable. Brilliant and terrifying. Vibrating with unrestrainable energy, but precise. Alien, unintelligible. Intelligent.

 That heap of pitchslag and discorporated pieces wasn’t the King that deserved to be remembered.

 They hadn’t spoken the same language when they’d first been led to each other. Their communication was raw instinct and base animal gestures. Think of that! He’d had a mate for less than a day, he’d never had a proper conversation with him, and they’d spent a lot of that time trying to kill either each other or some other titan.

 Rodan had known, as soon as the human plane veered off and left him careening into the claws of the gold titan, that he was no match for him. Ghidorah was three, four times his size. Even without his searing lightning blast he could have torn Rodan wing from body, easily. It was his right as an Alpha to do so. Godzilla had swatted Rodan out of the air enough times in the past for him to learn that the powerful could do more or less what they wanted to the weak with natural impunity.  This challenger would probably do the same.

 He wouldn’t let that stop him from fighting back, though. Let it not be said that Rodan was a coward. He didn’t switch allegiance meanly or without honor, either. Nature may have given an Alpha the right to kill him, but it didn’t dictate that his subject took it meekly. Rodan fought with all of his fire in that raging stormcloud, pecking at the hydra’s eyes, clawing for his soft underbelly. He had never fought another big titan in the air before, and he was unbalanced, having lost his singular advantage. Still he fought. His respect, his meekness, had to be earned, and any Alpha that he bowed his head to had to prove that he was worth it. If he wanted it.

 And Ghidorah seemed to have, because after a brief and decisive fight he’d let Rodan drop from his claws and hovered above him while he gathered himself, smoldering and aching, back into the stormy air. This was the point where Godzilla probably would have stomped him to embers.

  _You aren’t going to kill me?_   Rodan asked. _Wouldn’t blame you, and you wouldn’t be the first Alpha to try._

 Ghidorah’s three heads looked down at him archly. Lightning crackled behind them. Distantly, human buzzing.

  _You’ve probably heard of me. Rodan.  Maybe. I’ve been told I’m a pain. You’re King Ghidorah, right?_ He’d heard of the three-headed titan before, but he’d never met him. Rodan was too young, too far away from his usual hunting grounds. He just got snatches of stories of the golden beast that could bring Godzilla to heel. He heard that he’d been banished for good, although stories differed about where he’d gone; back into the sky, plunged into the sea tangled with Godzilla, deep into the icy southern seas…

 Ghidorah’s middle head, which the other two seemed to defer to, looped down to look at him.

 Rodan let himself be examined, feigning confidence he didn’t have. He got to get a good look, too, at three lean fearsome faces and silent gold eyes. King Ghidorah was a quiet one, then, nothing wrong with that. One of the other heads joined him, chirring in curiosity as it bumped Rodan with surprising warmth, given that a minute ago it had had its teeth buried in his shoulder.  His muzzle was warm and rainslicked, still sooty from biting Rodan.

 _Hey_ , Rodan said.

 The other head on the far side snapped at them. Rodan and the second head both flinched back, Rodan almost losing the rhythm of his wingbeats and dropping to the water line.

 Ghidorah’s heads drew back as he regained his balance and looked out across the stormy water to his island. Through the black clouds and storm-ozone they could smell smoke. Rodan looked, too, searching for the unearthly yellow glow of magma and flames. King Ghidorah – his Alpha, now, he supposed – his King would need a place to marshal his forces if he was going to try to fight Godzilla again. Besides, Rodan wanted nothing more than to be over land again; hovering over the water felt like he was tempting the old lizard king.

 _We can go back to my place,_ Rodan said, nodding in that direction. _My Alpha._

 The head that had first touched him snaked down again and rubbed itself against him, tongue flicking out. Rodan squawked in indignation that wasn’t very appropriate for a Fire God.  Another strong neck was wrapped around him, too. He couldn’t stay aloft without hitting one of them. _Do you – we should fly back to land,_ Rodan managed. Ghidorah didn't respond.  _I can’t hover like this for long, I’m-_

 Oh Fortune, he doesn’t understand the Terran vernacular, he realized.

 He was being buffeted by two enormous heads of a titan that was powerful enough to take a foot of topsoil off the entire planet and they couldn’t understand a word that he was saying. Were they scenting him? Like some kind of landbeast?  If Ghidorah noticed his heat he didn’t seem to mind, rubbing smooth brittle scales against his own. A display of affection, his hindbrain helpfully suggested, the first part of a mating dance.  The middle head, which seemed to be the most dominant of the three, screeched down at them again. He seemed affronted at the other two’s behavior and Rodan couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t seen a mating dance in millennia, but he was pretty sure that the participants were supposed to know each other first.

 The other two heads rolled back and let Rodan drop, rearing back to bicker among themselves for a second. Rodan watched them.

 They weren’t going to kill him, he realized. If he ever intended to, he had other plans now.

 And having an Alpha that didn’t just tolerate him, but seemed to want him? Enough to tangle his necks with him in a cocoon of stormclouds? Rodan could live with that.

 He dared to dodge towards the golden titan and caw at him, flashing a puff of sparks from his wings, a bottlebrush of fire against the sky. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but some base coding told him that if he wanted to impress some future mate this would be the way to do it.  He looped up past eye level, flashing his wings and splaying his claws out, chirring.  _I'll be good for you, even if you can't understand a smelting thing I'm saying to you, you big lizard. You won, and I won, too._ He watched himself in Ghidorah's eyes, a reflection of orange flashes.

He dropped and swooped up again, around, and three heads followed him, two eagerly, one seemingly pulled along despite himself. The two of them climbed upwards into the clouds, Rodan now leading them, their fatal pas de deux turning into something more teasing. One of the heads rose up to nip the edge of his wing, spraying sparks.

Rodan hovered and let Ghidorah catch up to him, watching now not with fear but appreciation as the hydra swooped up and around him. A little predatory, but everything that a creature like that did would look predatory.  Powerful, the coding inside of him said.  A titan like that is worthy of the title of King, and his progeny would be King as well, and none of them would ever know the sting of reproach or shame.  It would be as alien to them as they were to this world.  Rodan shivered at the thought.

One enormous tail brushed by him and around him and he followed it as Ghidorah pointed him towards his island, looking back at him questioningly.

_As you will, my Alpha._

With a grand sweep of a wing, intended to show off his broadness, his immense easy strength, Ghidorah turned his acolyte towards home.

 

* * *

 

A few moments before Godzilla resurfaced:  "What the hell are those things DOING up there?"

 

* * *

 

 

It was with the image of Ghidorah’s dead remains fresh in his mind that he hoped so fervently that the fledgling looked like himself, a respectable, unthreatening titan, too small to pose a threat to anybody but big enough not to be pushed around. The image of a glorious king in gold brought with it a smell of burning flesh that he couldn’t shake, and so he tried to imagine another Rodan instead. 

His own progenitors had left him as soon as he learned to fly, so at least he wouldn’t have to try and fail at parenting for very long. It would be a failure, of course, a titan who couldn’t protect his Alpha against an oversized bug and an ancient sludgelizard for a day wouldn’t be any good at raising a fledgling either. He considered leaving it somewhere to hatch with some other titan, but then he remembered Godzilla’s ferocity, Ghidorah’s blackened remains and his blackened name.

If the fledgling looked anything at all like the ‘false King’ then there would be no home for him in this world. If he was anything like Ghidorah than there would be nobody to take care of him except Rodan, and Rodan would have to teach him that the world was one that would hate him until he was strong enough to subdue it.

 He could always drop it somewhere, into the sea, onto a cold rock that would freeze it in its yolk, and get rid of the problem entirely. But if it was anything like Ghidorah – his alpha – and he wasn’t good enough for him the first time, maybe this was his chance to redeem himself. Either he would have a normal fledgling, enough like him that he wouldn’t cause trouble, or he would be a King.

 He’d worried about the egg for a season. They grew together.  He would talk to it sometimes, tell it about the things that he'd seen in his life.  The forests and oceans, the humans that used to worship him as a god, the other titans that he'd known. 

It hatched as the days outside their caldera were growing short. He watched it for hours, determined to let it hatch on its own, to fight its first battle without anyone’s help. He looked very closely for a beak.

 Pieces of slate-grey shell crumbled away, and a wingclaw, glossy from amnion, pushed through a flap of egg sac. After the fledgling rested from that herculean effort it was joined by a copper-orange foot, complete with wickedly hooked claws. Very promising. His son would be a warrior too. Then the rest of the wing, and then a head poking out, peeping, with disproportionately large wet eyes and a draconian muzzle.

 Rodan felt… something, suddenly, looking down at the wet and half-formed creature he loomed over. A swell of affection. Something like pride. He purred at it and tapped the other end of the egg with his beak. _Come on, get out of there._

The fledgling squeaked at him and flopped his free wing and foot forward. He resisted the urge to help, instead shuffling around him until it was warm and safe between his feet, under his smoldering wings. The rest of the shell finally gave way along with the egg sac, disgorging a wet ball of wings and neck as big as Rodan’s head at his feet.

 Head.

 Two heads.

 A beamingly bright two headed dragonlet, peeping and panting in a pile of broken egg and tephra.

 _Oh Fortune’s sake_ , Rodan whined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amorous aereal activities. Rodad and MTMTE references. Playing fast and loose with movie canon.  
> Your comments are the nuclear bombs to my creative Godzilla!! THANK YOU I LOVE YOU!! Im very susceptible to positive reinforcement and if you let me know you like it ill do more. like a small yappy dog  
> Daophin doesn’t have much of an independent self-concept yet, so his heads don’t either. We’ll see what happens as he matures… the Kevin genes are strong in this one though


	4. Chapter 4

Madison grabbed her tablet and an extra notebook on her way out of her room in the Monarch compound, stuffing them into her old canvas backpack and hitching it over her shoulders. Monarch had boxes of military surplus supplies in storage, and she’d been able to kit out her closet-sized bedroom with everything she’d need if she had to make a run for it; first aid kits with MREs, signal flares, an ancient GPS from before the days of smartphones. She liked to be prepared.

The compound was air conditioned, but the humidity from outside still leaked in and everything on the ground floor was clammy, including Madison. Monarch had requisitioned the remains of a shopping center near the base of the volcano when they got back and the squat, flat stucco building, with the dry cleaner advertisement still stuck on the side, wasn’t well suited for a military-science observatory.

 There wasn’t much money for research, though, with most of it going to Trying to Scrape the Remains of Boston Off of the East Coast. Don’t even get Dr. Stanton started on the funding issues. So this is what Monarch got, cracked linoleum and a wall of monitors on a former RadioShack display.

 “I’m going out,” she said to Marcia as she passed by the guard desk. “I’m taking a Jeep, but I’ll be back by sunset.”

 “Errands for Dr. Chen?” Marcia asked, looking up from what definitely wasn’t the El Salvador vs. Greece futbol game that she was watching on the security computer.

 “Yeah, just doing a drive around, you know,” Madison shrugged. “Collecting air samples.”

 “Careful out there, the replacement tires don’t come in until October and all of the ones on there are worn down to the cords.”

 “I’ll try not to. Lo juro!” Madison tapped her card on the reader by the door. “See ya.” She felt bad about lying to Marcia, even if it was by omission. Marcia was the only other person in the compound under the age of 30, and she and Madison had the echo of a sisterly relationship that she’d never had before. She was teaching her Spanish.

 Still: science.

 She popped the yellow lock off of the back wheel of one of the Monarch jeeps in the parking lot and got in, pulling off her lanyard to use one of the keys hanging off of it. Technically she wasn’t old enough to drive without adult supervision, at least in the States, but there was nobody around to tell her not to. Dad was in Washington, doing – whatever it was he did. Dr. Chen was thrust into the role of the head of Monach, stressed and resentful of having to fulfill a bureaucratic role instead of doing the research she really wanted to.

 Madison got to fend for herself, which worked well for her. She had a knack for survival.

 The Jeep peeled out of the parking lot and down the street towards the volcano of Isla del Mara. It was a beautiful June day, sunny and muggy. She was warm even in her tank top and cargo pants. She’d cut her hair off when she’d gotten here, shorter than Dr. Chen’s, but now it was down to her jaw again, choppy and in need of a trim. She felt sweat drip down her scalp and she ran a hand over her head and grabbed Rick’s sunglasses that he left in the cupholder. She had a half-hour drive yet.

 Parts of the city had been completely cleaned up, and parts, especially near the base of the caldera, were still reduced to broken shapes covered in soot and ash. The Jeep lumbered over the remains, bumping and groaning more and more as she got closer. She turned on the radio and let Dad’s Classix Mixtape Cassette start up where it had stopped last time, right in the middle of Heart of Glass. This was her favorite Jeep precisely because it’d been rigged to play music twice as loud as the others – a little engineering skill could really come in handy.

 There was a path up the near side of the volcano that led about halfway up, vertically. That was as far as Monarch felt comfortable going to the top of the caldera. Even when Rodan had disappeared into it for a year or so, nobody wanted to drive right up to his front door and see how he was doing. That was their problem, Madison thought, too much selfish self-preservation and an indictable lack of curiosity. If anyone knew that she was making trips up here she’d be chewed out. She liked it, though, the solitude and the fresh air. She had a nice view of the city and the beach beyond from the side of the mountain, and she could turn off the Jeep, kick up her feet and watch the titans.

 Usually it was Rodan, making his daily trip around the island. He’d only interact with humans if they flew too close; he liked to slap them from the air for fun. They’d lost two pilots that way. Now they used drones if they wanted to check on him.

 Daophin, up until recently, kept to the rim of the volcano, peeking out from time to time. She could get a good view of him from here with a pair of military surplus binoculars. Definitely didn’t look much like Rodan except for the secondary horns and the darker coloring. It was hard to tell, since it was usually covered in dust and soot, but in the right light she could see the gleam of metallic copper underneath.

 He was here again today. The smaller titan had gotten bolder ever since he learned to fly. Half of the city had been evacuated to the outer margins of the island as a precaution, but after watching him intently for a week the authorities decided that he wasn’t an immediate threat yet. They had an official set of eyes on the baby titan. Madison was the unofficial set of eyes.

 Daophin was preening himself, rubbing his face like a cat and sneezing. Unlike Ghidorah, he seemed like – more like a singular organism, rather than different heads stuck in the same body. They acted in concert, reacting in tandem. When they looked at something they both looked, rarely acknowledging with each other. No distinct personalities that she was able to see. She wrote that down in her moleskin as she watched him.

 After his heads were deemed suitably clean he moved on to the backs of his necks, trying to get at them with his wings and failing.

 "So dumb,” she whispered.

 She knew it was a mistake to anthropomorphosize wild animals, especially ones that were 100 feet tall and growing fast, but the baby titan acted so much like, well, a baby. Evolutionarily designed to be cute so that their parents wouldn’t abandon them. He was hard not to like, especially if you spent hours a day watching him discover things like Rain, Planes and His own Tails (watching him chase them around for hours? Priceless.) Sort of like her, he had to make his own fun, left alone all day.

 Daophin looked up from his preening, his attention suddenly caught by something further on down the mountain. He dropped into a crouch, leaning on his wings, kneading the ground under his back claws like a cat. Madison stood up on the car seat and looked over the top of the Jeep to see what he was looking at, a little concerned that some civilian had wandered up there despite the Monarch Property Keep Out signs.

 Something glinted in the afternoon sun, something shiny and silver.

 “What is that?” she whispered. Daophin jumped forward at it, then back again, tails lashing and twining with each other playfully. She craned her neck and squinted through the binoculars.

 Daophin leapt onto the piece of metal this time and descended on it with his back legs, beating the air with his wings and chirping. It made a distinct crinkling noise as he dragged it across the rocks, like a giant piece of aluminum foil. She could hear the drumbeats of his wing from where she stood and she shivered.

 She dropped the binoculars and picked up her camera, zooming in. Daophin let go of his toy and retreated a few lengths up the mountain before rearing back, wings and mouths open, to jump down on it again, feet first. Emulating hunting behavior, she thought, play-fighting. Daophin rolled under the piece of foil, hitting it gently with his back legs. The titan seemed to be losing his fake battle to – what looked like Madison to be a downed weather balloon. Isla de Mara had some bizarre weather patterns as a result of the eruption, and every once in a while one of the research balloons would be blown off course and capsize on the city below.

 Daophin wrestled with it, rolling over it and kicking with his back feet, gently enough not to tear it. Surprising delicacy, since the balloon wasn’t much bigger than a garden tarp and he was the size of a water tower.

 He was panting through his snout and snorting as he finally rolled over and pinned the foil balloon underneath him. His wings bracketed his prize, ready for anyone that dared to try to take it from him. One head furiously and compulsively licked the balloon, the other tasted the air. Madison snapped a set of pictures, close-ups for future analysis. She’d kill for a chance to get a biological sample from Daophin but it was still too dangerous to get near their nest to collect them. Until then, they could look at his phenotypical expression and behavior to evaluate him. And as valuable as it was, from a scientific perspective, she knew that the most useful information she was gathering was on Daophin’s potential to harm them.

 How dangerous was he, really? Would he be like Rodan, a cranky but deferential beta titan who kept to his own island? Would he be like Ghidorah, who, for reasons unknown to them, was motivated only by his desire to destroy?

 He was cute, sure, but play-fighting was an important developmental precursor to real fighting.

 Suddenly Daophin was looking straight at her through the camera lens. They were a hundred yards apart or so, but his yellow eyes filled the viewfinder. He cocked a head at her. She’d been spotted.

 Madison swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. Slowly, with one hand, she reached down to the keys hanging in the ignition, keeping her eyes locked with the titan’s. The weather balloon forgotten, he slowly turned towards her Jeep. Both heads flicked forked tongues towards her.

 Boston. The stadium. Her chest clenched.

 Fumbling at the dashboard with increasing panic, Madison’s fingers finally found the lanyard and followed it up to the keys. Daophin was crouching now, creeping towards her, lowering his heads to the ground, staring at her with slitted pupils blown wide. She dropped the camera, turned the key and yanked the parking break just as the cassette player roared to life at maximum volume.

  **-MOST OF FREEDOM AND OF PLEASURE NOTHING EVER LASTS FOREV-**

she slammed the Jeep into reverse, tires screeching as the peeled backwards. Daophin jumped straight up into the air and screeched in surprise, his wings flailing out above him in a threat display.

  **-ER EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE TH-**

 Madison finally looked behind her as she swung the Jeep around – the two side wheels momentarily losing touch with the ground – and sped down the volcano, spitting volcanic rock behind her. Don’t turn around, don’t turn around, don’t, DON’T! The gas pedal met the floor of the Jeep as it flew down the rubble path, so quickly that it barely jolted at all.

Knuckles white on the wheel, eyes almost closed, expecting huge claws crashing through the completely unshielded carriage at any second.

She reached the bottom of the volcano in a minute, maybe two, that felt like a decade to her. The Jeep flew past the decimated blocks, glancing over potholes and sliding over embankments of ash. She heard a _crack_ from underneath and the Jeep suddenly lurched to one side, the chassis screeching across the pavement and slamming against a ruined wall.

 Madison felt pain blossom under her temple and tasted blood, mixed in with sour dusty panic. Fingers trembling she unsnapped her seat belt and fumbled for the door.

  _How much time did she havehowmany secondsuntil howfar where_ \- she looked up behind her and saw – she saw... nothing.

 An empty midafternoon street, quiet and dusty except for the sad ticking of the Jeep’s engine. She shielded her eyes with a trembling hand and looked up the side of the volcano that wasn’t blocked by the building across from her.

 Halfway up the slope, more or less where she’d been parked, she saw Daophin, sitting back on his haunches watching her. The weather balloon hung from one of his mouths, gently flashing in the breeze. Just sitting, watching. He cocked his free head to one side. Madison took a deep breath, then looked down at the Jeep, bumper crumpled against the wall, listing gently to one side.

 “Fuck,” she said, resigned.

 When she looked up again Daophin was gone.

 

 

* * *

 

 

From the top of the caldera as the sun set:

 

_-weirdest noise, like some kind of human beast-call, and then it nearly turned itself over trying to get out!_

  _Those are humans for you. They’ll talk game, but they feint as soon as you try to square up. When I broke out for the first time they sent a whole fleet of fliers after me but they lost their stomach once they lost just a handful of them._

  _I hope I didn’t scare it. If I really wanted to catch it I would have. They probably know that, right?_

_It’s alright if you scare them, they should be scared of you. Things like you usually hunt things like them._

_Huh._

_Mm._

_Hey – hey, I was practicing hunting, and – hey, look at this glitter-thing I found!_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates PROBABLY wont be this consistent forever lmfao Updates Fauve is an outlier (with a 3 hr commute and no homework) and should not be counted. Catch me on tumblr/twitter at Fauvester for updates. Someone drew a Rodorah bappy there that makes me CRY!!!!  
> IM SO GLAD YOU ALL ARE ENJOYING!!! Rodan isn’t like the best dad but he’s got a lot of monster baggage to deal with… crippling inferiority complex, abandonment, missing his erstwhile baby daddy, etc.  
> Next: Daophin does something he shouldn’t. Then, echoes.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: implied violence

That night, riled up from meeting the human in the metalbox, Dauphin found it hard to sleep.

His progenitor slept above him, perched on his feet with his head tucked underneath a wing. Without the sunlight filtering in from above he was illuminated only by the wetrock around them and by the luminescent heat of his body. It was never truly dark in their cave, or quiet, either. Their nest was filled with the hiss of fire, the gentle hum of breathing, the whoosh of a giant heartbeat.

When Daophin was a wetling he had slept under his progenitor’s wings, clutched against his broad craggy chest for warmth.

Eventually he outgrew that, though, and his progenitor had built him a nest of volcanic rock and human-nest-bits from outside to sleep in, right by the foot of his perch so he could keep an eye on him. Back then Daophin would start crying and warbling if his progenitor left his sight, even for a second, especially at night when he was getting used to sleeping on his own. The first weeks had been terrible.

Now he rather liked sleeping alone in his nest, since he could splay out however he wanted without getting his horns cuffed for kicking his progenitor awake. He lay on his back, tails twining and untwining lazily, staring up at the circle of blueblack sky. Wetrock hissed and popped around him as a gentle soundtrack, reminding him of the sound of the human machines outside. The little bugs tried to hard to compensate for how weak they were. They obviously recognized that they didn’t have shells, or wings, or fire or anything that could save them from their superiors, but they looked at all of that, their insurmountable weakness, and then they tried to do better anyways. It was sort of inspiring. In a weird, embarrassing way.

His progenitor always told him not to worry about growing – _where did you get the idea that you should be anything other than what you are? you haven’t even seen another titan, who are you comparing yourself to?_ But somehow Daophin never felt right with his growing body. His feet were too big and his chest was too thin; he felt unbalanced, not even just while flying. It was like taking a step and expecting solid ground but falling into open air instead, all the time in the back of his mind.

 _Wait until you’re grown up,_ his progenitor said, sounding a little amused and tired. _Then you can start worrying._

His progenitor knew what to do, like always. _I wonder what the other titans look like_ , he thought sleepily. He cut himself adrift, letting his limbs grow heavy, his secondary eyelids film closed. One head curled against the other, rubbing scales against scales for the frisson of pleasure and comfort of touch, and he slowly slipped into sleep.

 The blackcoldness of the lack of air would have frozen something smaller and weaker, but not them. They had something stronger and hungrier running through them, alongside their veins, that made them fit for the empty airless air of space.   It would be dizzyingly lonely if they didn’t have each other, one of them looking resolutely ahead to their destination, one behind them to the world they came from, one providing commentary on the journey from one to the other.

They followed the command inside them that told them to destroy things, to raze worlds to the ground. They weren’t sure about what it would accomplish, eventually, but after enough planets left in ruins they stopped wondering. If they didn’t have the imperative to destroy, what would they have? What would their purpose be?

They flew onwards in complete silence. The star ahead was small, weakly yellow, with a spattering of planets and rocks orbiting it. Some of them looked to be at a good distance; it was worth taking a look, at least.  Maybe one of the dust motes had promise.

A blink.

The scene changed. They were soaring over a jungle now, the world bright green and richly colored underneath the roar of the storm. Rain lashed across their wings, almost horizontal, and they kept their eyes on the distant waterline.  There was no way that the wretched specimen would have missed their storm, unless he was skulking underwater trying to avoid them.

Then, what they’d been searching for – a roar over the sound of rain, ringing through the air and over the trees, and a point on the horizon blazed with blue light. Their challenger emerging from the ocean, huge and hulking, sickly blue spines glowing down his back.  It was hard to see his features from here, but they didn't need to, they knew the pugnacious face and small eyes well already.

He roared again as they drew near. If he saw their claws, the electricity racing down their body, he would know that he would not escape from them as easily as he did last time. He was arrogant for someone whose feet were planted on the ground, and who had to lumber through trees and bog just to reach an Alpha challenge. Ghidorah would soon show him what a real king could do.

A blink.

This felt hazy, distant. Like the eyes of their mind were wet and everything that they saw was blurry. It was barely an echo of a memory. They didn’t have any clear, real memories of being this small before. Their world was dark and blurry and it felt safe. It didn’t expand much farther than their body; they could brush the edges when they moved. There wasn’t even actually a them yet, each of them looked at the other as if they were strangers, not yet understanding that they were three parts of the same whole.

There were noises and voices around him. They curled in tighter around themselves - they would rather stay where they were and keep things the way that they were, close and quiet. The noises were pleasant, but they were unfamiliar, and they didn’t know if they were ready for something new.

Maybe they didn’t have a choice in the matter. The world cracked.

A blink.

There was blood in their mouths, hot and metallic, dripping into their nostrils and running in rivulets down their necks.

It mixed with rain and with the thick musk of sweat and fear, creating a potent cocktail for their senses.

Ichi started their victory call and the other two joined in, three shrieks in sequence. Any titan in the hemisphere would feel it, and if any of them wanted to try their skill, they knew that King Ghidorah was presently unoccupied.

He looked down at the titan at his feet, lying prone on the ground, bloodied flanks heaving. None of this planet’s creatures were a threat to him except for the “King” underwater, but some of them, with admirable but fatal dedication, sought out their better to try to fight him for supremacy.

Perhaps they should eat him, San suggested. A ritualistic show; also, not a waste of good meat.

Ugh, Ni responded.  Disgusting.

They lifted a foot and placed it delicately over the middle of the other titan’s three heads. Their eyes met, three pairs of yellow and icy blue. The defeated titan, white-grey fur matted with blood and charred flesh, whimpered. They didn’t feel sorry for him.

They could have dispatched him with a gravity beam, but no, they weren’t worthy of that kind of death. Ghidorah wanted to make an example of them – titans who didn’t fight like warriors didn’t deserve to die like them. Slowly and with cool satisfaction they crushed the titan’s skull under their claw, reveling in the warm sensation of –

 

Daophin woke himself up. Every muscle in his body was tense, and despite the nest-warmth he was shivering violently. He looked down at himself frantically. No blood, no bits of bone and fur, oh Fortune. Everything was accounted for.

There was a sick sour taste in the back of his throat. He swallowed hard. He rolled over onto his stomach, gathering his legs under himself, and called out for his progenitor.

There was no response. He looked up to the empty perch, then around the rest of the nest frantically. Up above, it seemed like the sky was just barely considering morning; it was too early for his progenitor to be out patrolling. Daophin tried again, a higher pitch this time, a pathetic fledgling-call. As the silence stretched out, sadness-fear turn into panic-fear. He’d never had a dream like that before, but it had felt so real, as if it were him crushing the wolf-titan in his claws, shattering and breaking it open. The sensation still lingered in his feet. He swore he could still taste it, smell it.

He leapt up to the opening of the nest, clearing it with a few wingstrokes. It was easier to get out now that he could fly.

He found his progenitor there, perched at the rim of the volcano, looking out across the water in silence.

 _I had a horrible dream,_ he said plaintively.

A fire-bright wing rested over him. _Just a dream_ , his progenitor said, sounding a little distant. Maybe it was the veil of sleep that made him sound so distracted. I _t’s over now, you’re safe. Nothing can get you here._

 _I dreamt I was killing someone. I don’t remember who it was or what they did, but I broke their head like a rock_ , he continued, almost gagging.

His progenitor looked down at him, finally. His beak was set sternly. _Daophin_ , he said. T _he world outside of here is a hard place for titans like us. Things like that happen out there. You’re going to have to kill, unless you want to be killed. Even the ones that call themselves ‘peaceful’, even they fight like demons when they need to. You won’t be an exception. You’ll have to fight harder than any of them._

Daophin ducked his head underneath a wing, trying to force the lumps in his throats down. He just wanted someone to tell him that things would be okay, not that he’d have to live out his nightmares one day.

 _Sorry. That’s the way the world works. I wish it wasn’t that way_ , his progenitor said. A beat. _Something’s coming. Can you feel it?_

Daophin didn’t answer.

_Why don’t you get back into the nest now. I need to take care of some things out here. Don’t come out until I come get you, okay?_

_What do you mean?_

_I mean, something’s coming and it might not be nice. I don’t want you to get any nightmares about it._

Daophin sniffled. _What about you? Is it dangerous? Is it another titan?_ He thought, remembering the dream.

_I’m a big titan, I can take care of it right now. Besides, I’m a pretty fast talker. It probably won’t be a very dangerous thing at all. Just in case, though, I want you to stay inside._

_Okay._

_Get some sleep._ He rubbed his necks affectionately.

_Okay._

He turned, obediently. He wanted to say something to his progenitor, something important, but he couldn’t get it past his lips. Behind him the rush of air and the sound of him taking off. It was too late, now.

* * *

 

He had heard her wingbeats when she was a few miles away. Even though she didn’t create any shockwaves or hurricanes in her wake, she was _loud_. It was probably the feathers, they shrieked and whistled when she flew as they slid past each other. As she got closer Rodan could also hear the planes that were appearing to watch the two of them. The humans were up and about; they were just as wary as he was.

He should be thankful. It wasn’t the Queen, who could probably smell deception on him like alpha-musk. And it wasn’t, thank Fortune, Godzilla. He flew out to meet the prodigal titan Quetzalcoatl over the shallows of the bay, catching her as she slid over the glittering waters at sunrise.

She called out to him as they approached each other, her pulsing call distinct from any other titan he knew. He hadn’t seen Quetzalcoatl since he woke and he was surprised by how happy he was to see her again, the long fangs, the distinctive slashed line she drew across the sky. Her wings were as large as Rodan’s, glossy green and feathered, and she herself was long and serpentine gold. She puffed her scarlet-and-green mane at him and bared her teeth in greeting once he was close enough to see.

_Brother Rodan!_

_Look what the tide washed in!_ He called back. The two of them looped around each other, her long tail lashing around him, his wings spraying sparks across her. Maybe fighting, maybe embracing.

_I thought for sure you’d be half dead, wings ripped off._

_What, were you mad that you weren’t the one to do it? Come to finish me off?_

_I was going to, but it looks like you’re doing just fine,_ she gestured with her tail. _Let’s go to your nest, child, I have things to tell you and I’m tired._

_Mm, might not want to. It’s still, you know, an active volcano._

_You forget that you’re not the only fire god in the world, Rodan,_ she snipped. _I can deal with a little magma._

_That’s true, but you won’t be the one living in a nest that reeks of burning feathers for the next season._

_I can’t believe you. Disrespectful little fledge._

He looped around her, trying his best to affect a playful attitude. Her territory had overlapped with his at times, and other than the occasional scuffle, the two of them had always had an unusually friendly relationship for titans. He kept to the North, by the great Bay, and she guarded the inland South. She had known him even before he settled in his Mountain; she’d been full grown and he a youngling, and she hadn’t killed him when she’d had the chance. He owed her a debt of gratitude for that, at least.

_What’s going on? You all miss me out there?_

_Miss you? Rodan, we’ve been calling for you for years! What were you doing? Didn’t you hear?_

Rodan watched one of the tiny human flying machines hover nearer. _Oh, that bellowing was a **call** -call? I thought His Highness just ate some bad fish or something. I figured after the first few times I didn’t show up, he’d stop expecting me to._

Quetzalcoatl stared at him. _You are a fool, Rodan. Either a fool or fatally arrogant. Godzilla has let you stay on your own because he thought that you needed time to nurse your frail pride after you backed the wrong Alpha. We convinced him to leave you be, and that you’d return to pay him his due on your own when you are ready. But he can’t wait forever for what’s his._

 _Why do I even need to do that?_ He responded, exasperated. _I already acknowledged him after he won. I bowed and everything. I’ll do it again right now! Hey, he’s King! King Godzilla! All hail King Godzilla! There, I said it, and you can go back and tell him that I’m not going to try anything stupid, like challenge him. He knows what happened last time, and the time before that._

_And the time before that. And you wonder why he’s suspicious that you’re not replying?_

The older titan dipped close to the water and he followed her, watching her skim her wings into the glossy sea-spray. They flew together, parallel to the shore.

 _Give me a year,_ he said, finally. _You can tell him that he has my word – I’m not leaving this island until then, and when I do I’ll visit him first thing._

_What’s going on, Rodan? You’ve changed._

_We all have. We’re not really gods anymore, are we, Ques? Not when we have to share the world with these little bugs. I don’t recognize the planet sometimes. Things changed so much while we were sleeping._

_Waxing philosophical doesn’t give you leave to shirk your duties,_ Quetzalcoatl snapped. _At least we’re still respected, yes? The humans think we’re all Three-Headed Dragons, capable of rending apart the sky._ She shivered. _If nothing else, he gave us that. He let us show the apes what we can still do to them._

They flew in silence for a few breaths.

 _It’ll take a week, maybe less if the winds are good,_ she sighed. _Find Godzilla on the coast and pledge your loyalty properly. I will come with you and be your witness if you’re frightened of him. Nobody would think ill of you for it after what you’ve seen him do. I think he’s quieted down, though, he is milder in his age, and with his mate to restrain him._

_Mothra? Oh Fortune tell me it’s not official!_

_Oh, I assumed…_

_They’re going to have the ugliest fledglings. All wrinkly, those spindly little legs on a big fat lizard body?_

Quetzalcoatl pulled a face. She had turned them inland now, and they were flying along the beach by the human settlement.

_Come now, child. You don’t need to be worried._

_I’m not worried, I told you. I just have… things to take care of. Trust me._

She squinted at him, pupils narrowing in her orange eyes. _That sounds suspicious, Rodan. It sounds like you’re planning something foolish._

_Planned? It already happened, and I’m trying to take care of it. Responsible, that’s me. Accountability._

She shook her head, looking forward. _I won’t ask you what you’re hiding. But he won’t accept your absence, and not giving him an excuse for it is just going to insult him further. There are less cowardly ways to issue a challenge, and more successful ways to show your loyalty to your Alpha._

Rodan nodded. _Yeah. Just tell him that I promise, I promise I’ll be there, but I can’t leave right now. Ques, I just can’t._

Her whipcord tail brushed over his flank, a gesture of care. He shivered, suddenly reminded of a powerful golden neck wrapping around him. Quetzalcoatl took it as an expression of fear and moved to fly under him like a progenitor helping to keep their fledgling aloft.

 _If that’s all you have to say to Godzilla, I will tell him,_ she said. _I hope that you can take responsibility for that, too. Keep yourself safe, Rodan, and take care of whatever obligation you have here quickly._

 _Yeah, I hear you,_ he responded, beak set. _Thanks. And safe travels. Sorry I couldn’t give you better news, or let you lie down_.

She shrugged. _Don’t worry about me, you have enough to worry about, yourself._

She peeled off from him, and with one searching glance over her shoulder she headed back to the water in the direction she came from, taking long, slow wing beats, tail whirling and uncoiling behind her. Rodan watched her go with a sinking feeling in his ember, then turned towards the volcano. With every wingbeat her words echoed in his head – absence. Challenge. Loyalty. Obligation. He thought of Daophin and winced. The fledgling was no obligation, at least not in the way she said it. Keeping him safe, however, was.

He needed to flee.

* * *

 

Quetzalcoatl glided back over the ocean.  She didn't want to return particularly soon; she had too much on her mind.  Rodan, she thought, you silly creature, what kind of fool do you think I am?  Do you think I haven't had a clutch before?  That I wouldn't know the signs?  What else would take a half-decade to take care of, child? You reek of soot and nest-sweat.  If you'd told me I wold have helped you, but - your pride, as always.

Hm. Keep your secrets, she thought, Godzilla will break them open for you one way or another. And she flew on.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thought this chapter would be more exciting but it came out a little mellow. Sorry if anyone was worried bout the boy. Giant! monster! genetic! memory! flashback!  
> Shoutout to everyone who said hi on tumblr!! HEWWO!!!  
> Couldn't find much official info on Monsterverse Quetzalcoatl so I made it up as I went. She's a hardass with a heart.  
> Next update won't be for a little while since I have a busy weekend, but I think next week will be some more Daophin adventures, maybe some more plot. Let me know what flavor you're craving.


	6. An Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A one-shot interlude. Not part of the main story but related enough to put it in to this one. Ghidora-lives au for bappy au, for Sa and also for myself.

_I knew you would come,_ one of them said.

 _I could feel you, even from halfway across this world,_ another said. _When you hatched it felt like a thunderclap._

 _My beautiful son,_ from the third.

Daophin resisted the urge to knead the ice underneath his claws in – what emotion was he feeling? There were too many to name, all of them blisteringly strong. They crackled inside of him like the lightning around him, arcing from wingtip to wingtip of the other titan, popping and buzzing.

 _My sire,_ he said, a statement and a question.

 _Your sire,_ they responded in unison, like a great sigh. It did not sound like his progenitor when he spoke with him; this kind of talking sounded like they were talking with a mouth full of smooth rocks, distorted and garbled, but still intelligible. Their three heads bobbed around him and Daophin dared to step a little closer.

They were standing face-to-face on a glacier, in the cold dark blue light of the arctic evening. A halfhearted storm above from when the older titan had made his way to meet his progeny.

He had so many questions, so many things that he’d imagined saying now, and he couldn’t remember any of it.

He saw himself in this other titan as he stepped closer. He saw his own broad wings, with the wing bones anchored at the junction of wing and body rather than splaying out from his flight-claw like his progenitor. A small detail, but one that kept him from learning how to fly for weeks. The long, muscular necks, and the elegant and alien heads crowned with whiplike whiskers and horns. It was so far removed from his progenitor.  He stood on his hind legs, his immense wings acting as great golden counterbalances.

 _You – look like me,_ he said. His voice caught in his throat halfway and it sounded ragged and warbled. _Nobody else looked like us._

 _Of course not. We aren’t born of this earth; we came here eons ago to settle here,_ King Ghidorah’s middle head said.

 _You take after us,_ said the left one as it snaked down to look at Daophin, still young but already only a few spans smaller than him. _That's a good thing, we’ve been told we’re very handsome._

The right head snorted.

 _What did the other beasts do to you?_ The middle heads inquired. T _he false little king and his playmates.  They were terrified of us, and you do take after your sire._

 _I haven’t met any other titans,_ Daophin confessed, heads drooping. _My progenitor didn’t want them to hurt me. He thought that they’d look at me and they’d see – they’d only see you. And you’d destroyed so much of their world._

A warm head pressed against one of his own and he nearly cried from simple happiness of contact. _Our kind was built to be alone_ , the middle head said imperiously. _It was well that you were brought up like that; forming attachments just means-_

 _How is he?_ The left head interrupted. _The last time we saw him he was getting gored by a moth, is he okay? Where is he? What did the wet king do to him?_ The left head got a bite to the horn from the right head for the interruption.

 _You can ask him yourself, he should be here any moment,_ Daophin said. _When he found out that you were still alive he insisted on coming, too. He wanted me to go ahead and talk to you first._

As if on cue, from above, the sound of wings flapping broke over the sound of vicious wind. Five heads looked up, watching as a dart of red rent the clouds above them. Rodan circled down to them and called out to his son below. A wordless expression – are you alright? Did he do anything to you?

Daophin chirred comfortingly at him as his progenitor glided down. As if a switch had been flicked Ghidorah’s attention zeroed in on the fire titan, Daophin pushed to the edges of his mind for the moment. Rodan landed next to his progeny, and he had barely touched the ice before he was bowled over by two of Ghidora’s heads wrapping around him.

Rodan screeched in indignation and tried to wrestle himself out of the Gordian knot of golden necks, doing little but earning himself a few zaps. _What the pit do you think you’re doing!_ The pteradon demanded. _You don’t get to do this, you pitspawn! Let go of me!_

Daophin worried the inside of his cheeks with his teeth.  His instinct told him to help his progenitor, but he had never fought another titan before, not one that was Ghidorah's size, and not the sire he had always dreamed of meeting.  _Stop it, he doesn’t like it,_ he called to his sire.  

The three heads stopped to look at him. Rodan stopped struggling.

 _You can talk to him?_ Rodan asked.

_You can’t?_

_No, I can’t understand a word he’s saying. Never have._

_Really? I’ve been talking to him already. His accent’s sort of distracting, but…_ Daophin responded.

One of Ghidorah’s heads was scenting the air around Rodan. One of the other two drew back his lips in a sardonic snarl. _He’ll have to excuse the other two. They’ve been separated from their mate for too long._

His voice had gotten soft at the end. Daophin looked to his progenitor, standing in a loosened knot of necks, looking down, fuming. It was strange seeing him like this; usually his progenitor exuded confidence, stability. Now he just looked lost and angry.

 _He says that he missed you,_ Daophin said.

 _How could he have missed me? He’s abandoned me for five years. He let me think he was dead,_ his progenitor hissed. _He abandoned us. Me. You. For all he knows Godzilla would’ve torn me apart the second he left but he still left me there anyways._

Ghidorah couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he seemed to grasp it from his tone, his angry gesticulations and the growing circle of melted ice underneath them.

 _He said that you abandoned him,_ Daophin said. Ghidorah growled in all three throats, but their heads bowed down. _What was I supposed to do, youngling. I was barely clinging to life. Not only did I lose my throne to that floating piece of pitch-slag, I lost my mate. I couldn’t protect him. No mate should countenance an alpha who couldn’t protect them._

 _He says that he couldn’t protect you. I think he didn’t think that you wanted him around,_ Daophin said. Rodan started to respond, then in a fit of inarticulate pique, punched the nearest neck with his wing. It did nothing, not even budge the right head, who just looked at him, chastened, out of the corner of his eye.

_It wasn’t your job to protect me, you big lizard! My job was to protect you! I was supposed to fight for you, and I did, and I wasn’t good enough, and then you left me! All I ever wanted was for someone to stay with me, one damn time, but instead you got your ego busted and decided to hide in the frozen wastes because you knew I wouldn’t look for you there! You coward!_

_He says it was his job to protect you, actually, and he’s mad at you because he thinks you left because you were embarrassed._

Ghidorah’s heads drew back. Lightning crackled and arced and the other two titans flinched down. _How dare you-!_ The middle head started. _We would never –_ the right snapped. _We thought you wouldn’t want us,_ the left said, finally.

 _He thought you wouldn’t want him,_ Daophin said to his progenitor.

Rodan stared, first at Daophin and then out into the icy horizon. The fight bled out of him, he smoldered, ice popping quietly as it melted under his wings. _I don’t care if you’re a King or an alpha. I don’t really care what any of the other titans think of you. Fortune knows I’ve never been shown any respect._ He sounded resigned.  _I just wanted to be with you. And I know – I know you have your own thing going on, you want to destroy the world or the humans or Godzilla or something, and I sort of knew that getting into it, but I’d thought we’d settle down in a volcano somewhere after that, chase humans around, raise a few clutches… Anyways, stupid, I know. Just hurt after you left._

 _He wants you to live in a volcano with him and have lots of fledglings even if you’re not an alpha,_ Daophin said bluntly. So it wasn’t verbatim, but neither of them would be able to tell anyway.

Ghidorah blinked. Lightning crackled.

 _He’s very direct, isn’t he?_ the right head said.

 _What did you expect?_ Asked the left one. _You know how the little firebird is.  Even when he can't talk to us he makes his will known._

 _Tell him…_ the middle head said, slowly and deliberately. _Tell him that I cannot leave this frozen circle, not until I am healed, for fear of inciting his false King’s anger again. But that if he so chooses, our heart belongs to him as much as it did the first time we tangled together. If he still wishes to be by my side I won't refuse his fealty._

 _He’s stuck in the arctic right now but that sounds good to him,_ Daophin said.

Rodan narrowed his eyes. _Are you sure that’s what he said? Your translation’s a little short._

_He’s kind of long-winded. His version was more flowery._

A Ghidorah head nosed Rodan, seemingly immune to the burning heat at the base of his wings. His progenitor clicked his beak indecisively.

 _Godzilla isn’t going to be happy if he finds out that you’re here and I didn’t tell him,_ he said.

 _Is he still talking about that hideous affront to creation?_  Asked the middle head. _We’ll take care of him when the time comes. Until then, we can amuse ourselves here. Our numbers will swell and we will raze the apostates to the ground. Ours will be an empire in the sky and the fiery earth. We will give our family this world, as a gift for their patience. We will raise new lords for other planets._

Daophin started to translate his response but Ghidorah opened his wings, still tangled with Rodan, and the two of them took off in a roar of thunder and wind that buffeted Daophin off of his feet (no small feat, since he wasn’t a fledgling anymore). A duet of sounds, short guttural screeches twined with his progenitor’s call. When Ghidorah’s necks let go of their quarry separated Daophin could see their claws locked together as they rose, almost obscured by the storm clouds.

 _Alright, I’m going to go… look at some ice over there,_ Daophin sighed. _Trying not to listen to whatever’s going on._

He’d never thought about being an older brother, but as he turned away from the couple locked together and spinning through the air, he found that he didn’t mind the concept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to everyone on tumbls who informed us about eagle mating behavior.  
> Back to scheduled plot in 3, 2.......


	7. Chapter 7

_Daophin_ , his progenitor said when he got back that morning,  _let’s practice flying today. I want you to come with me around the island._

Daophin looked up. He’d been curled up in his nest trying to sleep, like he was told to, but it was too bright outside and he was restless. He couldn’t shake off the memory of his nightmare. It had been too vivid and terrifying and he didn’t want to go back to sleep again if there was the risk that he’d end up in that terrifying world again.

 _Who was it you were meeting?_  He asked.  _Are you okay?_

His progenitor gestured to himself.  _Take a look, everything’s in one piece. An old friend of mine came to see how I was doing. Got all worked up over nothing._

Daophin looked down. If it was an old friend, why hadn’t his progenitor taken him to see them? He wanted to meet another titan, he thought. He wanted to see someone else who looked like him. Was his progenitor – was he ashamed of Daophin? Was he not good enough to show off? Maybe he was still too small…

His progenitor seemed to sense his dour mood, and he nuzzled him affectionately like he did when he had been a wetling.  _Even though they’re a friend, I still don’t want anything to happen to you. You can like someone and still not trust them. You’ll meet her eventually, her and all the rest of the titans, but not yet._

Yes, he was ashamed of him for being small. That made sense; Daophin didn’t like it either. He felt out of place in his body, some strange part of his hindbrain convinced that he was much bigger than he was, and, realizing that he was actually smaller than his progenitor, was very concerned about the disconnect.

 _It’s perfect flying weather outside. I think you’ll enjoy the view, you can look down on the humans you seem to like so much._  He sounded a little amused.

 _I don’t – I don’t like them, I just think they’re interesting,_  Daophin protested futilely as his progenitor took off. He followed him out of the caldera into the open air, getting two facefuls of embers on the way out and sneezing.

The two shot out of their volcano, Daophin following just far enough behind not to get a limb to the face. His progenitor’s fire didn’t bother him any more than the wetrock and occasional bursts of flames in their nest; if anything he enjoyed the sizzle of heat meeting his scales. He knew better than to fly beside him, though; he had seen the kickback from his flapping hurl human fliers out of the air and topple human nests when he got too close to the ground. For whatever reason his progenitor seemed to try to avoid that kind of destruction, usually flying high and slow enough to avoid producing shockwaves.

 _Let’s try flying out to the edge of the island,_  his progenitor called back to him.  _I want to see how strong your wings have gotten._

Daophin hadn’t done more than circle the top of their mountain since he first learned to fly. His body was still acclimating to it. The first day, his chest and wings had ached so intensely he could barely move the next day. It had been several days before he was able to try again, and even though he felt better after each time, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make it all the way to the water and back.

He followed anyways. If his progenitor thought he could do it, then he would do his best to show him that he could.

He strained to catch up, flying over him to avoid his powerful wake. One head looked down, to make sure he didn’t land on top of his progenitor, the other looked out to the horizon, the sliver of blue in the distance visible through a sheen of clouds.

The air was cool and fresh; his wings were already starting to complain from the exertion. He forced himself to breathe evenly and enjoy the view, the sweet simple pleasure of flight. I hope I never forget this, he thought. When I’m bigger I’ll fly everywhere, and it will become as normal to me as anything else. But I want to remember this little bit of contentedness.

He was so focused on his body and on his internal monologue that he didn’t notice the scene around himself changing. As the two of them rose into the sky together, the air started to change; the wind was picking up around them and the faint mist under and around them started to congeal into actual clouds.

A gust of wind blew Daophin off to the side.  _Hey!_   He shouted down to his progenitor below, miffed.  _I think you're hitting me!_

His progenitor looked up.  _That’s not me,_  he called back.  _Look around._

Daophin did, and started. The sky above him was darkening, from pale blue to stormy slate. Below him the ground was almost obscured, even though he wasn’t much higher than the highest peak of their nest. Looking to the left and right, trying to hold his wings still, he saw condensation running down the edges of his wings, followed by rivulets of steam across the coppery leather.

_What’s – Am I doing –_

His thought was cut off by a strike of sparks shooting down across his right wing, jumping across his wing bones and down the skin between them like a drop of water on wetrock. It skittered across and down in a wingbeat before zapping him at the base of his wingskin.

He shrieked and dropped, wings folding in instinctively. His progenitor rolled away just in time.  _Daophin!_  He yelled as the smaller titan barely caught himself a few lengths below him, flailing in the air.

 _Help!_  Daophin gasped. S _omething shocked me! This storm isn’t – we’re going to get fried if we stay up here!_

There was a roll of thunder from around them. The clouds grew denser, darker, and the ground and sky above were completely obscured. The two of them were flying through a sudden cocoon of stormclouds that were growing more threatening by the moment.

 _Don’t worry, I expected this to happen,_  his progenitor called back up.  _It’s your wings, your scales. You can make storms when you fly. Just stay calm and keep your wings out and the lightning won’t hurt you, it’ll pass right through you!_

 _How did you know this was going to happen!_  Daophin cried.  _Why didn’t you tell me!_

He felt the next jagged bolt of lightning before he saw it and he was barely able to dodge, throwing himself backward as a ream of blinding white energy shot past his shoulder. The concussive blast ripped through his scales, his skin, down to his bones, like someone grabbed him and threw him bodily aside. He couldn’t see for a moment, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel anything but the million sensory spasms from his entire body. He spun through the air again like a dead, deaf leaf.

His progenitor swooped down, passing underneath, close enough for Daophin to drop onto his back, just as he came to again.

 _Grab on,_  he cawed.  _Grab on to me!_

They were close to the ground now, too close. Daophin could see a wash of colors below from the human nests but he was too dizzy to make sense of them; all he knew was that they had precious little margin of air left. His eyes were filled with sparks and his wings didn’t feel like anything, which he would be concerned about if he wasn’t busy trying to remember how to breathe. He couldn’t grab onto his progenitor, though, that’s what fledglings did when they weren’t strong enough to fly on their own. He felt a stab of sour pride in his chest as his progenitor slew up under him, wings bracing to carry his son.

 _I’m fine on my own!_  he called down. The phosphenes had started to disappear; he could now hear the rumble of thunder and wingwind, the terrifying snap of electricity. He pushed upwards.  _I can do it!_  He wasn’t a weakling, not a half-baked little wetling that needed his progenitor’s help just to fly in a straight line. He gritted his teeth and angled himself upwards, trying to clear the human nests below.

His progenitor’s reply was drowned out by the gusts of wind he was creating, and by the roiling clouds that surrounded them as they flew on.

He was getting turned around. For a dizzying second he couldn’t tell what was up and down. Everything around him was grey, then black, then blinding white. He staggered. The world was spinning, his wings were electric with pain. One neck was tangled with the other. He flailed out, buffeted by rain and pulled by wind. He couldn’t hear his progenitor, or see any of his glow around him as he spun.

Through the storm-din, he heard something, cutting through the thick air like a scream. A thin wail. Not titanic, something else, spectral and distant. Was it a human cry? Pain, fear? It pulsed in and out.  Everything else was spinning nauseatingly, but the sound was constant in on his left side.

Focus on the noise, he thought. Arms singing in pain, he curled his wings and held them stiff, riding the jetstreams like a funnel. Find the sound.

* * *

 

The sound of sirens, thunder and buildings crashing down really brought her back to her childhood.

“Madison! Where are you going?” Dr. Schultz yelled through the hallway that Madison was running down, pulling on a bright red Monarch poncho.

“I’m turning on the sensors!” she called back. There was a pair of military issue earplugs in the pocket of the crinkly plastic parka and she put one of them in. “Data!”

“It’s not safe out there, you know that!” the researcher yelled back at her, but Madison was already keying into the heavy metal door that led to the roof.

The rest of the facility was in the basement, which had been haphazardly reinforced with steel girders in case something like this happened. Madison had been ready to join them; after all, she’d been grounded to the building after she brought home a jeep with a broken axle. Halfway down the stairs, though, she remembered that the sensor plates on the roof had been taken offline that morning for repair work. They’d missed the chance to collect data from Quetzalcoatl, although she hadn’t come close enough to the facility to collect the kind of information that would really be useful, but they should be functional now, although offline.

If she didn’t get them on, they’d miss whatever was going on outside. Their drones had been taken out as soon as the storm rolled in, and with the exception of the national weather satellites Monarch was functionally blind without their roof dishes. Not only were they missing potential data – air quality, kinetics, vocalization and energy signatures, they were putting the rest of Isla de Mara at risk, with no way to keep them updated about the titanic storm.

She took off her belt as she ran up the metal stairs by twos. She heard the storm before she felt the vicious surge of hot, wet wind slapping her in the face. Trying to catch her breath at the top of the stairs she looped the belt around one wrist, and clipped the other side to one of the pipes that ran from the top of the stairs across the gravel roof to the base of the titan attack siren. A failsafe.

The island had been sunny just a half hour ago but now it was plunged into darkness. The storm above her looked like it was building, grey and white valleys forming and collapsing like an enormous milkshake being mixed. She squinted up against the driving wind and saw licks of lightning, and a faint red glow. Rodan.

She put in the other earplug. The siren was a melancholy, deafening wail. Next to the siren was the refrigerator-sized sensor plate hub, connected to the set of dishes positioned at the edge of the building.

Madison pulled the poncho’s hood up just as rain started to lash down, ripped horizontally by the wind. One hand on the pipe, hunched down, she started to make her way to the sensor. It felt like she was being slowly run down by a car, only grounded by the pipe (which suddenly felt really flimsy to her.) Even with the plugs in, the siren was painfully piercing.

The sensor control box shielded her partially from the wind, and with rain-slicked hands she opened the sheet metal hatch. Inside, an array of colored switches and buttons blinked. These were second nature to her at this point; some of them she’d even helped design. One portion of the array battery was even derived from the ORCA. Closing it as far as she could to keep it safe from the rain she started flicking switches, wincing in the wind. The standby light started flashing. Then the audial screen popped up, pulsing with two interlocking sine waves with their associated information. The EM field reader was up next, the ppm spikes clustering at the top of the graph. She pulled up the radioactivity Doppler, the circular grid flashing yellow as it calibrated. As the compass swung around she saw two radioactive traces appear, one a kilometer out and stratospheric, the other…

She looked up. The cloud layer was almost resting on top of the building, strafed by wind.

As another bolt of lightning illuminated the sky she saw the jagged shadow of Daophin descending on the Monarch building, hurtling towards them with shrieking speed.

Madison might have screamed. She didn’t know. She ducked down by the control box. The belt cut into her wrist and the pipe was shaking, and the air around her was screaming too. Boston, the stadium. The ORCA crooning her to her death.

The thundering boom of something colliding with the roof knocked her off of her feet. The gravel gouged into her knees even through her jeans. She covered her head, hearing the splintering crack of the gutter and the façade of the building ripping off, the crunch of bricks and rebar snapping like bones. A piece of the defunct Dry Cleaner sign flew past her and skittered across the roof.

The titan attack siren was silent. She looked out from behind the control box. There was a downed titan ten feet away, lying half on the parking lot and half across the roof. One massive railcar-sized head was lying on top of the remains of the siren, panting. One of them was on the roof ten feet away, staring at her. Another piece of the front of the building gave way in a landslide of rocks and Daophin’s spiked tails swatted in their direction.

She stared at him. He started at her.

She raised her hand, slowly.

One globe-sized golden eye watched her, pupil widening. The heaving rasp of his breath had quieted and now all she could hear through the earplugs was the roar of the wind that ripped her parka around, the rain that was starting to let up. Daophin blinked, slow.

She could hear her own breath now, the heart hammering in her chest. She sodden belt around her wrist that chained her to where she crouched clicked against the pipe. Everything else was muffled and slow. Sirens in the distance.

The head closest to her slowly tasted the air.

“Hi,” she said.

It was a figment of novelization that someone’s eyes could tell you anything about them. Physiologically they were the same among species, with small variations in color and pattern that didn't change based on  _emotion_  or  _intent_. You could argue that facial expressions communicated what people claimed they “saw in their eyes”, sure. She’d looked Ghidorah in the (six) eyes before and she hadn’t seen the ’true evil’ that other people claimed to see; just eyes that were probably perfectly normal for his species, set in heads with wickedly sharp teeth and spines crackling with electricity.

Daophin didn’t look good or evil. He just looked like a titan. Sort of like a komodo dragon.  But he was looking at her, just looking, even though he could blast her or crush her with no effort at all. He blinked again, catlike.

“I’m going to go now,” she said, gathering the wet belt in the hand attached to it. “Your Dad’s making it really hard to be outside. I guess the storm was you. Maybe you could try flying further out to sea next time or something.”  

Daophin made a sound deep in his throat, a sort of warbling rumble. Amusement? Pain? She started slowly backing up.

“I know it sucks to break everything around you, believe me. But you’ve got to do the best you can to live without hurting anyone, okay? You don’t have to try and destroy the world just because your parents did. You’re smart and curious and I think – “ what the hell was she saying? Titans were supposed to have the approximate brain capacity of an elephant at best, and even if they did have personality traits, they still wouldn’t understand human language, “that you don’t really want to do that.”

Daophin waited for her to finish, listening even as her voice wavered and got lost in the wind. She heard the sound of metal and rock groaning and she looked behind her to where his other head lay on the remains of the island’s titan siren. It was looking up now, into the quieting storm cloud. Looking for Rodan, maybe. Looping around, it looked at her shook off a face full of gravel.

“Go find your mom,” she said as she backed up. She pointed up, then waved in that direction. “Go, shoo. Get him back into the volcano before he does any more damage.”

The head that was lying next to her rose up too, and both heads were now bobbing down at her like brachiosauruses.

“Go, get!”

“Madison!”

It was Dr. Schultz, finally audible, from the entry to the roof. She was tied to the rail with emergency twine, reaching out to Madison through the wind.

Madison wriggled her wrist out of the belt and grabbed Dr. Schultz’s hand, stumbling in the wind. From behind her – oh, never turn your back on a titan, they’re too clever sometimes – she heard the creaking of movement, and threw her arms around Dr. Schultz just as an enormous blast of air threw them halfway down the metal stairwell. Her scraped knees hit the stairs and her back took the brunt of Dr. Schultz’s weight as the two fell. She tasted blood in her mouth.

From outside, the wind screamed, and the sound of wingbeats grew further away.

 

* * *

 

_I’m okay, I promise, I don’t need any fussing._

_Yeah, you got hit by lightning. You’re not that okay._

_I’m sorry._

_Hey, it wasn’t your fault. I should’ve told you that that might happen._

_How did you know it might happen? Why didn’t you tell me?_

_Because. Because it – I hoped – because…_

_You’ll tell me when I’m older, right._

A sigh.  _Yeah. I’ll tell you when you’re older._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone else big into Silverwing when they were kids? Or adults? …no just me? lmfao  
> Do I tag this as Madison!whump? I swear to god it’s not intentional, I love her and wish her the best, from one science gremlin woman to another. She’s just tough enough to take a beating  
> Next chapter: *jaws theme*  
> (for reference, I have no well-delineated larger plot planned, I’m just having fun with this. But I want to see Zilla and I shall give myself Zilla)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw violence

From across the sea, on a sandspit on the edge of the sunny Atlantic –

_HE SAID WHAT?_

* * *

 

He’d been careful. Really careful, all things considered. He didn’t have any alpha or mate to protect him, and in fact the sire of his progeny was _persona non grata_ as far as his King was concerned, and the progeny was undeniably marked with the sins and multiple heads of his father. Fortune’s sake he was living on an _island_ , surrounded by _sea water_ , which was Godzilla’s personal global jet-stream. And he’d still managed to keep his secret.

Fortunately the humans weren’t able to tell the King anything. Fortunately it had taken years (he didn’t want to think about what that meant for his status among the titans) for the King to look for him. It smarted, that he was thought so little of that nobody bothered to see what was happening to him, but it was so much the better for him. Every day Daophin got stronger, more capable and independent. Some day soon he’d be able to leave and go inland to where the King rarely dragged himself out.

In the water, Godzilla was a beautiful, deadly dancer, carrying his terrifying bulk with grace. On land, though, he lumbered and stomped. If he got out to a desert somewhere, or on top of a mountain, Daophin could see the King coming days before he made it there and get out as fast as he could.

So, the storm issue was a little concer-a little interesting. He’d be more visible than Rodan would have liked, whipping up hurricanes out of clear skies wherever he went. Did the storm-making extend to Ghidorah’s other unique features, too? The fledgling (not a fledgling now, he thought, almost a threeyear) had not shown any affinity towards lightning, and had not been broken enough to demonstrate unusually robust healing. Sometimes he licked magma, so evidently he’d gotten some kind of heat-proofing from Rodan, but other than that he took wholly and unfortunately after Ghidorah. If he could shoot gravity beams he’d be able to protect himself better. He’d also be a bigger threat, though, a choicer target for the King.           

Daophin would have to go soon. Quetzalcoatl would have met with Godzilla now, even if he was on the far side of the ocean.

Rodan blinked at the sudden emotion that the thought provoked. What was that? He asked himself, shaking his head as he flew. He’d done his best as a parent, definitely above and beyond what nature required of him, putting his neck on the block for a child that shouldn’t exist. He should be relieved to get rid of him and get back to his own life. _What kind of life? Solitude and embarrassment? Getting used as Godzilla’s punching bag? An empty nest?_ A voice in his head said. Stop that, he told himself sternly. That kind of thinking’d only get him into trouble again.

The thought of companionship, of power and recognition, maybe even – maybe affection, even – that was how he ended up here in the first place.

His normal patrol around the edge of the island had intensified. He focused mostly on the side facing the ocean now, circling back twice a day and a mile or two out, straining his senses. When he was particularly cross Godzilla’s glow was visible from the air, but if he wasn’t beaming like a human city, Rodan would have to rely on the faint overlay of heat and energy in his vision field to catch him before he got to the island.

Today, like every day for the past several years, there was nothing but human boats and big fish. Far above, almost at the edge of the atmosphere, Daophin was flying, too. The air was thin and hard to grip up there, but he’d be stronger when he flew close to Earth if he practiced up there. The fledge also didn’t seem to like bringing his hurricane down on the human nests (probably an excuse to not deal with the lightning, himself) and the air was dry enough up there that the storm wasn’t as serious.

Now that he was over water he could safely drop down from above the clouds. The water rippled and furrowed beneath him.

The air was fresh and salty. His wings had cooled down a bit from when he’d first woken, but they still smoked and sparked beautifully as he flew. He hoped the humans appreciated the show.

He wished that he could say that he heard Godzilla before he saw him, but he didn’t. He’d been distracted; there was no warning sign. One moment he was watching the ocean cleave underneath himself, and then the next he was slammed out of the air by an enormous head.

Godzilla did not try to catch Rodan in his mouth. A small mercy. he thought. Instead the King lunged out of the otherwise placid water and headbutted the pteradon. Rodan hit him at full speed with a sharp _crack_ and spun down to the water.

Head spinning, he caught himself just as one sizzling wing dunked into the ocean. Pain lanced through his body, his neck especially. He lunged upwards and the pain radiated breathtakingly down and across his chest.

_DON’T YOU DARE._

_Your Highness!_ Rodan shrieked, caught between the imperative to flee and the fear of disobedience. The hesitation gave Godzilla a second to grab the flying titan by the neck as he stood, rising from the water like a mythical island. Rodan squawked again and wriggled in his wet grasp, but to no avail.

_DON’T GIVE ME THAT ‘YOUR HIGHNESS’ TREATMENT, RODAN. YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN TROUBLE._

Rodan hooked his back legs up to push against Godzilla’s flank so he could hold himself up and breathe.

_Yeah! Hey, sorry, I know you’ve been calling, I’ve just been having a little bit of a rest over here, taking stock of things._

_NO, YOU HAVEN’T. **I** TAKE STOCK. GIGAN TAKES STOCK. GHIDORAH TOOK STOCK. YOU SULK._

Rodan winced at the mention of Ghidorah’s name.

 _Sorry, I’m sorry, Godzilla,_ he said. _I promise I’m not going to cause any trouble, any more trouble. I already know I’m not on your good list after the last time things happened, and you know I’m not stupid enough to try anything after that._

_I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THAT. YOU’VE DONE SOME PRETTY STUPID THINGS NOW AND THEN._

Rodan choked a laugh. _Yeah I know. This time I promise, though, I just needed some time away from things._

Godzilla’s grip had softened so he could breathe. They both understood that keeping him in a necklock was just a ritualized form of power demonstration, like grabbing someone by the scruff of the neck. There was no animosity, just obligation. Although he wasn’t the most emotive titan, Rodan saw Godzilla’s blunt, rough face soften.

_YOU DID GO THROUGH A LOT RIGHT AFTER YOU WOKE UP. THAT KIND OF SHOCK CAN DO WEIRD THINGS TO PEOPLE. STILL NO EXCUSE FOR WHAT YOU DID, THOUGH. WE BOTH KNOW THAT AS LONG AS ONE TITAN DOESN’T TOE THE PARTY LINE, THE WHOLE SYSTEM I GOT MY GUTS BROILED JUST TO SET UP IS IN JEAPORDY. IF ONE OF THE MUTOS FOUND OUT THAT THEY COULD SKEEVE OFF AND GET AWAY WITH IT HALF THE WORLD’D BE ON FIRE BY TOMORROW. SWEAR TO SALT, I CANT TURN MY BACK ON THEM FOR HALF A SECOND._

He punctuated this with an earnest shake of Rodan’s neck. He let himself go limp, swaying in his grip, wings drooping.

Rodan managed a chuckle. _That’s leadership,_ Zilla, he said. _I can’t see why anyone’d want to do it, much less fight for it, but hey, there you go._

Godzilla relaxed and Rodan felt his pounding heart slow. He guessed Godzilla wasn’t a bad guy, not in the way that Destroyah was, or maybe Ghidorah – he wouldn’t know if he was ’good’ or ‘bad’, since they’d never had a conversation about each other’s long term Plans For Earth – he was aggressive, foul-tempered and rough around the edges, but Fortune’s sake, so were they all. He’d thrown down his life to protect his throne and in the process that had meant protecting everyone else from a rotating cast of usurpers. Rodan could at least respect his dogged tenacity. One temperamental king to rule them all.

 _Why don’t you let me get myself together and I’ll meet up with you somewhere along the coast?_ Rodan asked. _Round up all the troublemakers and give them the old Godzilla discipline._

Godzilla snorted. He started to speak, and then the sky folded down on them.

 Rodan was hurled from the titan’s hand as the two of them were bludgeoned into the water, hit by something from above. It was Daophin, feet first and screeching, pummeled Godzilla with his wings while he struggled. He was trying to drag his claws down Godzilla’s neck, but the King’s scales were too thick there, scarred from other fights and impenetrable.

 _Let go of him! Leave him alone! The_ copper dragon roared as the waters below him churned and thrashed.

Rodan swallowed water and lurched out of the ocean. His wings were soaked, extinguished, and it took him a few seconds to rip himself form the surface and get himself airborn.

 _Daophin!_ He screeched. _Get out of here, kid!_

Daophin looked at him, eyes wide and wild. _No, you get out of here! I’ll distract him!_

A scaly arm emerged from the water and, casting about in the scuffle, grabbed onto one of Daophin’s legs as the smaller titan tried to force him underwater.

No! If Godzilla dragged him underwater he’d drown if he wasn’t decapitated first! Rodan dodged back into the fray, slapping against Daophin’s wings and grabbing Godzilla’s claws just as the King’s head surfaced next to them.

 _You don’t - you have to get away right now!_ Rodan called, clawing against the hand holding Daophin. _You can’t fight Godzilla, leave him for me!_ He could hear the sizzle of fire on flesh – why wasn’t the damn titan letting go?!

 _I can’t, I’m trapped! Help! He’s got me!_ Daophin choked out of one head while the other frantically tried to pull upwards, his wings cycling frantically. He’d just now realized that he was being pulled into the water below.

 _RODAN!_ Godzilla roared.

Rodan looked down. Only the king’s eyes were visible. That was enough, though. The fierce rage and regal hatred. For a second time seemed to stand still, fixed like an afterimage burned into his retina. Godzilla lurching from the deep. Daophin, copper scales glinting in the light like molten metal, wings and necks arcing gracefully, submerged now past his hips. Still only a fledge, barely old enough to leave the nest.

He had failed Ghidorah. He’d turned away for his mate’s execution.

Ghidorah atop their volcano, glowing gold and red, surrounded by flames just like Daophin was now framed by waves. I’m sorry, Rodan thought, he didn’t know who to.

He turned and plunged toward’s Godzilla’s face, half under the brackish water and starting to glow sickly blue already. Letting out a throaty battle screech, feeling his embers flare he went for the King’s eyes, narrowly missing his teeth.

 _RODAN, YOU-_ Rodan dredged his claws across Godzilla’s face. He felt one catch under a scale and rip a line of them off, scoring the skin underneath. Godzilla roared. One of his arms was occupied; if he could just keep him distracted enough to let go, and too occupied to use his atomic breath, Daophin could clear some distance from them.

Rodan barely avoided the other arm and went for the eyes again, but Godzilla turned too quickly and he got the side of a thick skill instead. Immense jaws snapped shut a breath away from where Rodan had been before he rolled out of the air and when he drew back he saw that Doaphin had managed to wriggle free and he was hovering above the two, poised to jump in again. The whole membrane form leg to tails had been ripped; one foot was twisted painfully.

 _No, you slagging – get away from here!_ Rodan yelled up at him. Godzilla was underwater; never a good sign.  At least Daophin was further away than him.  _That’s an order! Get as far away as you – ngh – as you can!_

They looked at each other for a second, progenitor and progeny. Daophin had always been good at listening to him.

Then he could see it in the horror on his faces, and hear it in the churning and suction of the water behind Rodan. The dawning realization of fate.  He didn't turn around.

 _Get out of here_ , he started to say. What he would have meant was _I love you,_ and _I’m sorry_ , and a lot of other things that he didn’t think of saying before, but he didn’t end up getting to say either. The King in all his furious vestments returned, and this time, the violence was not ceremonial.

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOO… that's a lot of events going on really quickly..  
> Also funny cause Daophin probably could survive without oxygen underwater, given Ghid’s immunity to the O2 destroyer, but Rodan wouldn't know that  
> Godzilla in ALL CAPS is heavily inspired by godzillas-big-fat-diary on tumblr, to whom I owe my life and my sacred honor.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw suicidal ideation??

Daophin had never flown harder or faster in his life. He pummeled the air inelegantly, wings aching, heaving short panicked breaths. His maimed foot shot little blinding jolts up his leg as it dangled. His progenitor. The lizard monster. The water. Black water swallowing him. Get out of here, he’d been told. Stupid, stupid, stupid, you’re so weak, Fortune, you can’t take care of yourself, you just get yourself into trouble over and over again and how he’s _dead_ and it’s _your fault._

He sobbed. He tasted the metal tang of blood and panic in his mouth.

Behind him he heard a roar, long and guttural, and the sound of something big moving through the shallows below. He’d left his progenitor there to die with that monster, dying to buy Daophin a few seconds to extricate himself from the mess that he’d made. And now the creature was coming for him, too, and he didn’t know why or what to do. Would their nest be safe? Would he even be strong enough to flee?

Turn around and fight, you mewling wetling, a voice in his head told him. At least you’ll die with honor. Your progenitor met his end like a warrior, knowing that he couldn’t defeat the sea creature but struggling until the end.

Flee, another voice told him, he sacrificed himself so that you could get away. No wonder why he never introduced Daophin to any of the other titans, no wonder why he never talked about them. They were hideous, slavering beasts. Murderers. It felt like he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs, like his throats were constricting, his vision narrowed by terror.

He didn’t dare look behind himself. The human nesting-grounds were below, though, he saw the neat square blocks of color pass by in his peripheral vision. Another earth-shattering roar ripped through the air and Daophin dropped, terrified, then righted himself. The air was thickening and he could smell the now-familiar ozone surrounding him as he flew. Just a few minutes until he got back to their nest. He could hide there.

What will you do one you’re there? The voice asked, accusatorially. Wait for your progenitor? Oh, right, he’s burnt out in that monster’s gullet, and you’ll end up in the same place if you don’t fly fast enough.

His progenitor thought he was strong enough to fly around the island, maybe even further. His progenitor always knew what to do. He felt sick.

 _GHIDORAH!_ The creature roared, distant, below. It was on land now, accompanied by the sound of heavy footfalls and human-nests splintering. _GHIDORAH-SPAWN!_

He surged forward in a blind panic. The air was starting to prickle, droplets of sparks dancing down his wings as he pumped them. In less than a minute since he’d fled he’d already torn the light cloud cover into an ominous storm that smelled like lightning and danger. Below, human alarms whined.

A strange sound layered over it, a low buzzing hum. Once again he didn’t look behind him, he wouldn’t be tempted by his damned and fatal curiosity. The part of his hindbrain that produced the angry, violent voice started screaming alarms at him, though; the spines along his jaw stiffened. Some atavistic scrap of memory in him recognized that noise and had very bad memories of it.

That was the side of his brain that told him to bank upwards as fast as he could, barely avoiding – a blast of pure terrifying energy, blindingly blue, not hot to feel but intensely powerful. Daophin yelped and escaped it by a winglength or so, riding the electromagnetic blast outwards into the upper atmosphere. Dodging lightning had prepared him for this, at least. Another roar. Was that lizard doing that? Fortune’s sake, he already had teeth, he could already tear other titans apart, why could he also vomit up energy?!

If he tried to return to the nest he’d be shot out of the air as soon as he was visible. Could the beast climb? He had wickedly strong arms and great heavy footfalls and that was all that Daophin knew about him. He could summon energy blasts somehow. What else could he do? If he hid in his nest and that creature found him, he’d be incinerated. Burnt up or worse. Like his progenitor. His eyes were burning with tears.

He rose into the upper atmosphere that he’d dropped out of just a few fateful minutes ago. The air was cold and thin here, his wings couldn’t get anything under them. He broke through the top of the forming cloudcolumn like a whale breaching – the lizard, Godzilla, his progenitor had called him, could follow the storm, but he wouldn’t be able to see him well enough to blast him with his fiery projectile.

And Daophin? Daophin could fly. That was all.

He would have to keep flying. No matter how badly his wings ached and his chest burned. Besides death, there was no other choice.

The sounds of the monster beneath him were getting quieter, as were the human-nest noises. Now there was just the rumbling of the storm that he was above and the sound of his own wing-beats, his sharp and ragged breath. He was steaming, he realized, the heat that he’d collected from their nest over a lifetime hissing as the sheen of moisture on him froze. His progenitor had had embers underneath his rocky scales that would have kept him warm up here but Daophin was too different from him to survive like him in this place.

He flew on. The storm followed, trailing under him like an immense dark grey wing. The sound of thunder as soft as a whisper made him cast his heads around wildly, looking for whomever had joined him, but there was nothing, just him alone, caught between thin crisp killing blue above and swirling darkness underneath, trapped between two equally terrifying worlds.

He flew on. The view was so desolate and so unchanging that Daophin lost track of how much time he’d spent flying. He was completely alone now; for all he knew he could be flying into the middle of the endless ocean, and when he finally ran out of energy he’d gently plunge into the water and drown anyway, after everything his progenitor had done to save him. Maybe that was what he deserved, at least he wouldn’t have to live in a world that was so terrifying and terrifyingly alone.

He flew on. His wings were probably in excruciating pain but he’d blocked that out, put it in a little box with all the other signals that his body were sending them and storing them in some dark sooty internal crevasse. His mind was too busy with its own pain.

He flew on even as the sun set and the sky flashed brilliant colors that he was blind to, and then until those drained away into dark blue and then black. He heard human flying machines but he didn’t care enough even to look at them.

He flew on until his arms gave up, overriding his numbness, his draining fear, and locking up. He tried to flap again, once more, but the muscles in his shoulders and chest had gone from fiery to completely useless. A heaving breath; no response. Even his body was abandoning him. He whimpered as he started to drop, running out of momentum. His world started to tilt.

If you have to fall, glide, his progenitor told him. Don’t hit the ground with your wings closed or I’ll have to scrape you off of the rocks.

He closed his eyes and tried to flex his finger bones, his forewings, anything, but the rest of his limbs seemed to have joined the revolt. Behind his eyelids he knew he was dropping into the stormclouds, he could feel himself slipping into the humidity and the warmth. It was nice; if he let himself drift he could imagine that he was back at the top of their caldera watching his progenitor glide across the sky. He could sleep like this, with the air whipping past him and the spicy smell of lightning.

 _I’m tired,_ he thought to his progenitor. _I’m sorry, I tried, I did, but I’m so tired. I couldn’t save you and I couldn’t fight like you and I couldn’t even get away right. I’m sorry you got stuck with such a failure of a fledgling, but at least I won’t be around to insult your memory for very long._

It was getting warm now as his scales scraped against the air as he fell. He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to see the water or the ground rise up to meet him. He’d spent all this time trying to leave the ground, and here he was, returning to it. Poetic.

Then, a sound. A sharp pain, like a pinch, to one of his limp wings.

He squinted one eye open, stomach lurching when he realized how fast he was falling, breaking through the bottom of the clouds. It was night-time and inky black. He had no idea what was under him.

There was a human flying-thing behind him (above him, now below him, now above him again as he spun). He recognized it by the high-pitched whine. It produced another scatter of rapping noises, onetwothree, and then more pinches all over.

Fortune’s sake. Were they trying to kill him too?

He scraped deep to find enough energy to lift a wing to shield himself. It immediately caught air and he was ripped to one side, spinning off in a different and dizzying direction. There was a pop! Pop! And a whistle, and then a blaze of fiery light shot past him. One of his heads snapped at the projectile as it passed, and then hissed at the flight-thing as it shot another volley of pinpricks at him.

He opened his wings a little, annoyed, and then a little more, braking in his descent. He wasn’t spinning anymore and he could see the lights of his puny human company dodging back and fourth.

 _Sod off_ , he said.

If he was going to die, he wasn’t going to have those little bugs have the last say. One of his heads nipped the other and the sensation was enough to dredge him out of his fatigue.

One more try, Daophin, he told himself. If he didn’t use his chest, just his arms, he could keep his wings half-open and then at least he wasn’t in freefall. A sharp angle was better than perpendicular no matter where you landed.

The air was getting hotter. The flying machine was still trailing after him, buzzing and taking potshots, but he’d gotten the message. He smelled fresh dry ground-breeze and felt warmth radiating from the ground.

He was gliding now. Where the strength to lift himself came from he didn’t know, but the flying-machine was next to him now, buzzing above one of his leadlike wings and blinking red and yellow almost like little sparks of fire, almost like someone poked holes in the night sky and his progenitor was trying to come through.

He heard the echo of his wing-gliding wind on the ground below. _Don’t land on your wings or you’ll break them and they’ll never grow back right,_ he thought. _Hah. Like they ever came in right the first time._

The great fatigue pulled itself over his heads again just as he felt his scales kiss the soft ground again. He closed his eyes. We’ll see if I open them again, he thought, and he fell.

* * *

 

Madison was sitting at the radar with her head in her hands as she listened to the staccato voices from the monitors around her. The Mexican military, the NSA, the American army and, finally, Monarch, were talking over each other in an attempt to reconcile what had just happened in the past several hours. The sirens were on again outside, cutting a mournful tone. The rest of the Monarch workers were out in the city trying to help the trapped and wounded, slogging through knee-deep mud and blown-down trees and signposts.

Godzilla’s trip through Isla de Mara had taken out a determined swathe of buildings. It was a small mercy that he’d gone through the less occupied areas of town, looping around the residential district. On purpose? Who knew.

Madison had been there with the rest of her coworkers, a handful of biologists and technicians with their military attaché, when they’d gotten notification that Godzilla was heading towards their island. They’d prepared for the worst. They’d gotten it.

Her face was wet. The backs of her teeth were sour, she hadn’t brushed her teeth and it was almost 4 am. She didn’t think she’d eaten since that afternoon, when Godzilla resurfaced. Her body was like one big, tensed muscle, coiled, poised and ready to spring when it hear the starting gunshot. A shuddering sigh.

“We got him down,” Colonel Foster said. Madison looked up, recognizing her voice.

The monitor, green-screened from Lt. Griffen’s plane’s night vision scanner, showed a shape stretched across the desert floor. Its heat signature betrayed Daophin; two brains burning through energy on the receiver, neon yellow and red on a black and green backdrop.

“Vital signs look like they’re holding, but I don’t want to get in any further,” Griffen said. Madison swallowed thickly. “Don’t know if he’s awake or not, and I don’t think he’d be too happy to see me after I shot him.”

“That’s okay, pull out for now. We’ll get our observation drones out there as fast as we can.” That was Dr. Chen.

“We’re going to deploy a ground force in a three-mile perimeter and evacuate everyone in 20. He’s in the middle of a national park. Thank god he didn’t land closer to .. Terlingua? Is that how you say it?”

He was alive after flying for almost 12 hours straight, crossing a national border and hundreds of miles of mountains and deserts. Madison was almost proud of the adolescent titan.  Just a week ago he'd been knocking down Monarch buildings just like old Dad when he tried to fly on his own.

From the radios and screens around the dark room, more conversation about personnel.

She had her own work to do. One of the sensor buoys in the bay was still online after Godzilla showed up (and then later, lumbered back into the ocean, disappointed at losing his quarry), sending out an occasional ping. She’d been trying to get a connection all night. She needed to do something, but the thought of going outside, looking the massive destruction in the bare and violent face again, made her stomach turn. Looking for kids under the rubble. The smell of gasoline, moisture and burning things.

She ran her hands through her spiky hair and grunted – at least she could get a little sleep out of it, she’d been tracking the fleeing titan all night, trying to convince whoever she could not to try to torpedo him out of the air. Dr. Chen had been sympathetic but there was only so much Monarch could do after the latest Titan Event.

The buoy pinged back and Madison looked up. A single data packet, just a few lines, showed up on the screen of her clunky dust-caked laptop and she eagerly opened it. Her eyes were blurry and she rubbed them until she saw stars, trying to clear them up. She was too young for reading glasses.

ST 17 C

Wave ht .55 m avg

Salin. WNL

Wind 7 kmh SSW

1350 mSv

She opened the associated png, just a single snapshot of the radioactivity and heat profile of the surrounding two miles that the buoy took on an hourly basis. Maybe Godzilla was there, maybe some dead fishermen.  Either way since nobody else was in the lab tonight, someone had to keep track of the environmental data.  That was what they were there for, after all.

There was nothing like that, though. She stared at the crude pixellated shapes until she could make out what she saw at the edge of the slice.

The shape of what was, undeniably, a wing, burning at the water’s edge at at 1,200 celsius.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus... part 2 begins!  
> this should be tagged as Madison!whump and OC!whump i guess orz i'm so sorry babey you gotta go through the desert of pain before you can.. uh...... do other things as a protagonist.........  
> I also just read up about Gigan and i'm LOSING it. i love how unabashedly dumb the concept is. fucker can't hold hands with anyone! Edward Scissorhands mfer! That's so sad! He's DEFINITELY gonna show up.


	10. Chapter 10

His body dragged him awake later, inch by inch, slowly. It felt like he was trying to stand in wetrock, up to his necks, blind and senseless. His limbs didn’t respond to his mind’s faint and polite requests to move, to make sure that they were still capable of it. They felt distant, heavy and alien to him.

The first sense that he was aware of was the muddy brightness behind his eyelids. Could he open them? They were annealed together and somehow his eyes felt… gritty. Disgusting. He groaned and dared to slit them open. The world outside was bright and crisp and it almost hurt with how _much_ it was.

Also there was another head lying next to him, looking at him. They blinked. He was suddenly both the observer and the observee.

That other head was him, too, though. He felt his heart speed up. The other head blinked. So did the first. They looked at each other appraisingly, at the long snout, the twin battery of horns, their amber eyes and still-sooty scales.

 _Huh_ , Daophin said, and blinked all four eyes. _That’s weird._

He didn’t have the energy or the desire to explore this, though, because right at that moment the memory of what’d happened before slammed back into him like a lightning bolt. His heads snapped up and cast around him, panicked, body tensing like a live wire. This reminded his muscles that they existed, and were actually not in the most comfortable state right now, and they responded with a unanimous outcry of pain and cramping. Daophin yelped as his wings curled back on themselves and his chest bowed out, trying to hold itself from the pain of exhalation. He gasped upwards, staring into the unforgiving blue sky as his body spasmed. After a few seconds of deliberate breathing he was able to uncoil himself again and he stretched out on the rubble he was lying on and looked around.

The land was flat, rock and sand dusted with little globs of spiky greenery. A mile or so away, the horizon was dominated by blocky reddish cliffs, cast blue in the shadows. He cocked a head, listening around him; the faint whistle of wind, the buzzing of little animals, the quiet sizzle of warm rocks and the Earth’s hum. Other than that, a truly alien silence.

Silence. His chest suddenly caved in with emptiness and he choked out a sob. It was never silent at home. There was always the roar of the mountain’s fires, humans, his progenitor’s embers rustling and hissing. There was never silence because he was never alone. His eyes stung and he pressed himself into the ground, aching and heartbroken.

He must have lain there for a while, gently negotiating in and out of consciousness. Every time he thought about standing up, doing something, his body and his heart beat him into submission and he ended up sprawled in the sand again, deathly tired.

The sun went down, he recalled seeing stars, and then it came up again. The next time he woke up it was mid-day. There was some kind of bush poking him in the side that started to get annoying at that point, and eventually he was awake enough to roll over onto his side to avoid it.

Wasn’t his foot broken? He looked down, over his stomach, and stuck out the offending limb. Maybe it was the other one. He held that out, too, and rolled onto his back in the process, staring up at them. Both of his feet were fine, intact, just as he remembered. He clutched his claws a few times just to make sure, but they weren’t any sorer than the rest of him. The membrane between them and his tails, which he knew for sure had gotten ripped, was also in one piece. He squinted down at it; maybe there was a faint marking, the skin a little shinier, but it was barely noticeable. He examined his feet closer, nosing them, but they were both fine.

He wiggled up onto them, gingerly, waiting for shattered bones to give way, but it didn’t happen. His body was less sore than it was at first and he was able to stand, holding his wings out, looking around. There was no sign of Godzilla, no sign of anyone, just scrubland, rocks and cliffs as far as he could see. Quiet.

A fait buzzing signaled the presence of a flying-thing in the air a few hundred feet from him, probably too small for a human to fit inside, but undoubtedly of human make. It hovered in the air on unseen wings, and Daophin could feel it watching him. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, being observed. Just a few days ago one of them had tried to shoot him out of the air, and even though it hadn’t done any damage it had still been annoying and presumptuous. Had it been watching him the whole time, witnessing him broken and alone and doing nothing?

He huffed and scooted up to it on his legs and forewings, tails swishing.

 _Don’t you have better things to do than gloat?_ Daophin snarled at it. The drone jerked into the air. Daophin leapt after it, powerful legs uncoiling with the help of his wings, both of his heads shooting up at it as it rose.

With a crunch, his heads knocked into each other, knocked out of the way of the drone, which stuttered and flew out of reach and away as quickly as possible. He yelped as he fell back to the ground, chins hitting the rocks.

That’d never happened before. He’d never had to think about his heads being discrete appendages, they’d always coexisted neatly, dodging out of the way if they had to, acting in concert. He looked at himself and realized for the first time how strange it was to have two heads, two sets of eyes. He’d thought that his progenitor was somehow physically impoverished by only having one, and half the number of mouths and field of vision, but he didn’t have to deal with the difficulties of having two of them.  Maybe he was the strange one, having two.

He picked himself off, shaking himself to try to get off the layer of dust and grit that’d accumulated since he got here. _Where is ‘here’ anyways?_ He asked himself, looking around. Maybe he could get a better view from above. Could he fly yet? Experimentally he stretched his wings, rotating them, and found that they weren’t as sore as they’d been before. After a moment’s hesitation he took a running start and then jumped up into the air, staggering up until he was at cliff-level. A sudden muscle spasm dropped him down a few winglengths and he had to veer sharply to avoid one of the flat rocky outcroppings – his spiked tails smashed against it, raining red rock down to the ground below. Once he got his bearings, though, he was able to hover and look out.

Flatlands and rock.

He flew out, stretching his wings, aiming for the row of cliffs on the horizon. He didn’t remember which way he’d come from and his heads still hurt when he thought too hard about what had happened, but maybe he could stay here for a while. The heat wasn’t so terrible, and he’d be able to see anything coming to kill him from miles away. _Although,_ a voice suggested, _a good field of vision didn’t help your progenitor_. He winced and landed, wings pinwheeling. Well, he’d make sure to fly away if he saw a big lizard trundling towards him from the horizon. He’d patrol like his progenitor did, looping around and watching for trespassers with unremitting attention. He’d have to be vigilant. He squinted over the horizon.

He'd catch any threat.

 _What do we have here?_ From right behind him.

Daophin whipped around and yelped, half retreating and half preparing to attack, claws unsheathed but scrabbling backwards.

From behind his rock (the rock he’d claimed as ‘his’ just a few seconds ago), something drew itself to its full height. Daophin stared, up, up as the creature unfolded, glinting blindingly in the midmorning sun, terribly and fearfully serrated. Godzilla, his mind shrieked. He came and hid here while you were sleeping and now he’s come to finish you off!

Don’t be dumb, he thought, Godzilla must have had hands, since that was what he used to grab him. This creature, instead, had two wickedly sharp blades the length of Daophin’s wingbones.

Which was actually scarier, come to think of it.

Daophin threw himself into the air, tripping over his own tails before he was able to remain his balance.

 _Whoah, hey here, kid! Didn’t mean to scare you off, come on back down,_ the creature called. It sounded amused.

He looked down once he was out of arm-or claw-reach and he looked back down. The creature was staring up at him. Why did he only have one eye? And where were the rest of his scales? He was too shiny, like a human flying-machine. The rows of fearful metal spikes, the serrated red crest – it screamed _painful_.

 _Who are you?_ Daophin demanded, trying to sound braver than he was.

 _Come on down and I’ll tell you,_ they responded jocularly.

_Tell me first and I’ll talk, how about that?_

The creature stepped back several steps from the rock, which was just a little taller than him. He must have been lying underneath it, hidden by the outcropping above. They held up their claw hands, and even though his ferocious looking metal beak kept him from smiling properly Daophin could see the red slit of his eye crinkle in amusement.

_See? Not going to jump you. You surprised me when you crashed down on my favorite sunning rock, I’m sorry if I scared you. It’s hard not to be scary when you look like a walking armory, you know? My name’s Gigan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before._

The creature looked too much like Godzilla for Daophin to be comfortable. He was a little smaller than the sea-lizard, he could see now, and of slighter build, but covered in vicious spikes. He didn’t know what an ‘armory’ was. He landed as far away from the other edge as he could, tails whipping to and fro. _I’m not from around here_ , he said _. I come from an island by the ocean. My name is Daophin._

_You’re a long way from the ocean, Daophin. Are you from over near Tiamat’s hunting grounds? Or further south, near Rodan?_

Daophin swallowed. _Rodan. Rodan is my progenitor. He raised me on his island._

Gigan visibly startled, then after a second, threw back his head in what Daophin assumed was laughter, a high-pitched grating noise. It also revealed Gigan’s serrated underbelly in the process and Daophin shivered, thinking about how lethal all the other titans were compared to him.

_Rodan had a pup? Rodan? My-world-starts-and-ends-with-me Rodan? And he actually raised him to adulthood without getting him killed? That’s completely-_

_He was a brave warrior!_ Daophin snapped, eyes smarting. _He was the best progenitor! He took care of me and he kept me safe from all of you! You monsters! And he died trying to keep me safe! And I swear to him that I’ll kill you if you ever say that about him again!_

Gigan seemed taken aback, raising his arms up to assuage him. _Hey, hey! I’m sorry, kid._

 _I swear_ , Daophin hissed.

 _I won’t talk about him like that anymore. Guess he was a different character when he wasn’t trying to show off for Godzilla,_ Gigan said apologetically _. I was just surprised is all, you don’t look like him._

Daophin looked away. Like he didn’t know what a failure he was.

_You must take after your sire. I’m guessing it was Ghidorah? I haven’t seen him since we all got the notice to wake up, but I heard he and His Royal Highness had a little tousle. I can’t think of anyone else with lots of heads that looks like you do. The scales, the tails, yeah, Ghidorah’s kid, alright. Wow._

Daophin cocked his head. _Sire? My sire?_

_Yeah, you know, your sire, the other parent._

_Other parent? Wh – I only have a progenitor. Just that one, just Rodan._

Gigan stared at him. Daophin stared back. Gigan scratched the back of his spiny neck with his bladed arm.

_The other parent that contributed to... your creation?_

_Rodan laid me himself. I hatched in his volcano, I didn’t need anyone else to create me._

Gigan took a slow breath. _Rodan didn’t teach you about that then, huh._

Daophin blinked again. Gigan continued haltingly. _Well, when two titans really… like each other, they can sometimes produce… another titan, that’s a mix of the two of them. Sometimes it looks more like one, sometimes it looks more like the other. Some of us can do that with ourselves and we don’t need someone else’s help, but having another parent can help give the kid useful extra features. You know, like if I sired a kit they might have these,_ he raised his bladed arms. _Or one eye. In Rodan’s case, they might have a beak or be… filled with flames, or however he gets around. But in your case you got Ghidorah’s extra features._

 _Who is Ghidorah? Is he still around? Can I talk to him?_ Daophin asked quickly. This was explaining so much. Why he didn’t look like his progenitor, why he was so different. That was what Godzilla was talking about when he’d called him Ghidorah-spawn. He didn’t have a progenitor anymore, but somewhere out there he had another parent, a sire, who could teach him how to _be him_. Why hadn’t his progenitor told him? he thought desperately. 

Gigan looked up at him, then out to the horizon, squinting. _I’m sorry, kid, he’s gone. Back when we all woke up, he and Godzilla fought for leadership of this world and its titans. He was a fighter, Ghidorah, neither of us were from here but he knew this planet better than anyone else and he knew how to win it and hold it. He was a force of nature. Godzilla only won because he cheated; the humans helped him out in their last battle, Mothra, too. In a one-on-one Ghidorah would’ve destroyed him and we all knew it. That’s why Godzilla went for him right away. Ghidorah was a good and righteous King, and he should have been our leader._

 _Godzilla,_ Doaphin said quietly, his heart dropping to his stomach. _That’s the monster that killed my progenitor too._

Gigan stepped to the base of the cliff and looked at Daophin, close enough now that he could see the glow of his eye underneath some kind of glassy pane. _I’m so sorry, Daophin. Rodan deserved better. That’s the kind of King Godzilla is, he won’t rest for a moment if something threatens his power. Is that why you ran away? Did he find you and kill your progenitor?_

Daophin nodded and turned away, eyes burning. _I tried to save him, but then he died trying to save me. I wasn’t strong enough. I was't.. I..._

A light tap as Gigan touched the wingtip closest to him, reaching over the cliff with the blunt end of his arm-blade. _It wasn’t your fault, kid. You know that, right? Godzilla’s cruel but he’s almost impossible to defeat. Rodan knew that. The only one to do ever beat him was your sire, and that’s why he killed him. That’s also probably why he tried to kill you. Just looking at you – I mean, you’re a spitting image of him, all glowing and powerful. I bet you’re not even full grown yet. You could be his size when you are, and with the right guidance? Training and experience? You could probably take down Godzilla yourself._

 _I don’t want to fight him,_ Daophin said thickly. _I don’t want to fight anyone. Don’t want to lead. I just want – I need to get away from him. I need to go inland and hide._

_I know. I know what that’s like to be that scared. But you can only run for so long. And besides, what’d happen if Godzilla found out about some other kitling that would grow up to threaten him? What if he orphaned another baby, or worse?_

Daophin bit his lips. Gigan was right. He had a duty to his progenitor to stay alive, but also to the other fledglings, unhatched in volcanoes and in caves and underground, to try to keep them safe.  Nobody should have to go through what he had, and nobody had a right to rip progenitors from their hatchlings no matter who they were.

Daophin had the legacy of a Kingly warrior sire to live up to. Fighting for justice was in his blood.

 _I don’t know what to do_ , he said. His voice came out as thin and pathetic, but Gigan ignored it and smiled.

 _Stay with me, kid. I’ll tell you all about Ghidorah and all the other titans._ He tapped Daophin and his smile grew wider. _And then I’ll teach you how to fight._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEET AAAAAA im so excited :') 2019 KotM is the only Godzilla movie I've ever seen so 99% of my characterization is from Gojipedia and my own dumb mind. I love playing w Gigan though. he's such deliciously bad news. plus, is that Daophin's two-headed self awareness i see?? and some healing nonsense????  
> Anyone else going to tfcon toronto this weekend? If so come say hi! I'll be Overlord at least one day.  
> Next chapter: *Rocky theme* *ominous violin music*  
> Your comments give me life. i adore all of you. if it wouldn't make me feel weird to shower each and every one of them with responses I would, but i do read all of them and TREASURE them


	11. Chapter 11

Madison had tried not to be relieved when she was relocated from Isla de Mara following Godzilla and Rodan’s battle. She’d been working with Monarch there in some capacity for over a year and she’d grown to like the city, the people, the ocean and the simmering volcano. But now, looking out from the helitransport as it rose into the sky from the half-destroyed Monarch site roof, all that she could think about was the violence that the city had seen.

It should have been a nursery, Isla de Mara. A safe place for research, to live, raise kids, both human and pteradon. She could have stayed here after college, far away from the east coast with all of the complicated emotions associated with it, cloistered in an island hideaway with people that understood her and creatures that needed to be understood.

Now the island was a sick-bed, a raw wound across the southeast. Nobody dared to go down to the beach except the military (wary) and the crack team of Monarch sciences and veterinary physicians (wary but also perversely excited).

The helicopter’s porthatch closed up with a mechanical grinding and Madison looked over at Lt. Griffin, who was navigating them up and out. She owed the former trick pilot her thanks; she’d been the only person to volunteer to rouse Daophin over Big Bend. They’d pitched it to the Air Force as an attempt to keep the titan away from the nearby cities, but really, it had been to try to rouse the adolescent into not killing himself. Or letting him die, at least, they had no way of verifying a conscious attempt to end one’s life. The 50 seconds where he’d been in free fall from the mesosphere had been as terrifying for them as if he had been trying to die.

“ETD to touchdown, 0600 hours,” Griffin said. Madison pursed her lips in a tight smile.

There was no Monarch site yet established near Titanus Gigan; the semicybernetic titan was migratory. His territory could be defined as ‘wherever Godzilla isn’t’, which happened, in this case, to be central southern America. That’s where the two of them were headed now, with a helitransport packed with the equipment that the Monarch site at Isla de Mara could spare.

“I’m going to call ahead and triage,” Madison said, gesturing to the back of the helitransport. “You mind?”

“Go ahead,” Griffin responded. Madison unbuckled her seatbelt as soon as the plane got to cruising altitude.

“Hey,” Griffin said when Madison was about to maneuver out of the cockpit. She looked down at the lieutenant, who was smiling up at her. Madison felt her heart speed up, looking at the indulgent warmth on her angular face, showing through the veneer of military propriety. “I just wanted to say, I heard you over the radio call up there the other night. You’re one hell of a tough woman. I can tell you really care. I don’t know why, but those monsters should be glad to have you on their side.”

Madison started to respond, but then she thought of Mom, and how easily sympathy for titans could become destructive. She felt herself blush hot from her ears to her neck nonetheless. Too human still, she thought.

“…Thanks. I mean, I was probably yelling a lot. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize, you were doing your job, so was I,” Griffin said, looking back out. “I’m happy I could help out, and getting to take potshots at mini-Ghidorah was an added bonus.”

“You’ve probably had enough excitement for ten military careers, huh?”

“Chasing gods wasn’t really what the Air Force pitched us when they visited our high school.”

Madison smiled. She would have asked the handsome pilot not to refer to them as monsters if she could help it, but that came perilously close to sounding too sympathetic to them. So she retreated to the back of the helitransport instead and called her dad.

It went straight to voicemail. Madison chewed the inside of her cheek as she listened to his answering machine message.

_Hi, this is Mark. I’m unable to come to the phone right now, but if it’s an emergency send me an email and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible._

Please leave a message after the tone. For more options press 1. _Beep_.

“Hi Dad, this is Madison again. I’m on my way to the mobile observation camp. I might be out of range, but Rick’ll be there and you can call him if you need me.” She thought for a moment, staring at the wall across from her as the helitransport hummed. “If you have a few minutes to consult on titan behavior, I have some questions you might be able to answer. Uh, let me know if you’re free. Bye.”

She hung up and sat down on the ledge between two crates of machinery and rested her head on her hand. How sad is it that she had to set up an appointment to talk to her only surviving parent? She might as well be an orphan. Her psychiatrist had told her that they both needed time to grieve in their own way, but they’d had five years; she hadn’t really had a dad since before she was a teenager. They disagreed on the nature of titans, they disagreed on Mom and Andrew, but jesus, they were the only family each other had right now. Like a lot of things in life, it wasn’t fair.

Her next call was to Rick. The acerbic sonographer’d somehow (unintentionally) made himself indispensable in replicating the ORCA’s ability to track titan communication, and he’d been (unwillingly) appointed the head researcher tracking Daophin. Dr. Coleman was in DC and Dr. Chen was in the middle of the Atlantic; he was the only other researcher who’d tracked Ghidorah during the Second Event.

“We’re on our way,” Madison said when he picked up.

“Oh, thank God. When do you touch down?”

“Six hours or so. What’s going on?”

“The eagle has landed. And he’s hanging out with robo-zilla.”

“What do you mean, hanging out?”

“I mean they’re hanging out-hanging out, for the past few hours they’ve been playfighting and wrestling each other. There was even some familial grooming going on. It’s almost like Gigan’s taken on the role of an adopted parent. You think you can get Mark to weigh in?”

“I dunno, he’s not picking up his phone. I don’t know if he’d know anything about alien robot bonding anyways. It’s interesting that Daophin found his way to that particular titan, though, and that he hasn’t run away yet after he got attacked by Godzilla.”

“Their sonogram readings are at crypto-social levels. Little guy’s safe, at least for now. Can’t say that Gigan’s going to let him stay that way for long, though. You got his dossier.”

“Do we have backup in case?”

“A couple sonic shells, some antiaircraft missiles, pocket change that the brass let us borrow. I still don’t know if it’d be biologically ethical to actually attack a titan that we can predict to protect another one that we can’t, though. Honestly, Gigan rarely ever bothers us, but Daophin’s an unknown variable.”

She knew that his heart was in the right place. Daophin had become something of a Monarch icon; it was hard not to love the bumbling little biological miracle, especially if you were out of his flight range. One of the Monarch intramural soccer team mascots was the Lil Sluggers, a fat orange dragon with two heads and angry googly eyes.

“Yeah. I’ll let you know when we’re close, but can you let me know if something bad happens? Sorry. I just want to, you know, keep an eye on them.”

“C’mon, Maddie, you’re not just a summer intern, you know, you don’t have to feel bad about wanting to be in the loop. You’re a friggin’ Russell. Besides, I’m not the head of the team here anymore, so I’ve got time on my hands.”

“What? You got replaced?”

“I asked to be replaced, you know I don’t do team management.”

“You don’t play well with others, right.”

“Other people just can’t appreciate my sparkling wit.  It’s their problem.”

“Huh. Who’s in charge?”

“One of the Monarch-FEMA wonks, Dr. Farmer. She’s got a stick up her – well you’re gonna meet her soon, you can get your own impression of her. Anyway, I’ll keep you updated.” He took a sip of something. “It looks like – uuuuh, dragons are wrestling again. Everything’s good here.”

“Thanks, Rick.”

“See ya.”

Madison ended the call and looked down at her splayed-out boots.

There was no ‘natural balance’ that the titans provided as a counterweight to what humans had done to the Earth. That was what her mother had thought.  That view was, in retrospect, painfully simplistic and Western-centric – 70 Fortune 500 companies were responsible for 95% of what Dr. Russell had claimed humanity’d done to the world. It wasn’t fair to punish the majority of humankind, who hadn’t done anything more than scrabble to survive, for the sins of some avaricious businessmen who didn’t care about the environment. And they had been punished – the cities ravaged by rampaging titans, the crops burnt and land destroyed – had mostly hurt the innocent. She saw that on Isla de Mara and in LA.

But she still believed, deep down and deeply, that the titans belonged on their Earth just as much as humans did. Earth needed defenders, and since the humans that actually cared about the air and the water weren’t strong enough to keep it safe, then its giant children would have to.

The military made perpetual attempts at gaining access to Monarch’s data in order to try disposing of the titans, and even if it didn’t rankle Monarch’s high command to have their authority impinged on it went against most of their deep-held principles; that life, even titanic (especially titanic) had a worthy purpose.

She thought of Daophin, his intelligent, inquisitive yellow eyes, the way he watched her from the mountainside. Then of Godzilla, fighting with such beautiful ferocity over Fenway, his scales humming and glowing. Mothra’s warm, wet infant breath. They were worth protecting.

 

* * *

 

 

Daophin hit the ground again, ungainly, limbs twisted awkwardly. A puff of dirt rose up from where he landed.

Gigan looked down at him with his blades resting on his hips. Daophin was impressed that he wasn’t cutting himself with them; they looked razor sharp.

_Alrighty then, there’s a lot to work on._

Daophin groaned. _If you let me fly I could do a lot better._

_Yeah, but what if Godzilla grounds you? Breaks your wings or drags you into the ocean with him. You have to be prepared. Come on, kid, let’s see how you do in a chokehold. Try and get me from the side this time._

Daophin obligingly got back up onto his feet and wingbones again, then lunged for Gigan, coming around on one side and aiming his teeth for the metallic titan’s flank. In a frighteningly fast flash of metal and scales Gigan spun to the side, one arm snapping around one of Daophin’s necks and pinning it between arm and body. With a twist and a roll Gigan twisted one neck to the ground and grabbed the other in a firm hold. If he’d been pressing, the blade would have gone right into Daophin’s neck.

Daophin tried to roll around and twist his heads out of the other titan’s grip, but one neck was perilously close to a blade and one of them was trapped against the rock. With nothing else to do he kicked the other titan as hard as he could and threw his body over Gigan’s, landing flat on his back on top of him.

He yelped as he felt the serrated fins slice across his shoulders. He’d fallen right on top of them. Gigan’s grip only faltered for a second and Daophin was back in a dual necklock. He choked – even though they were only sparring it was a little too tight for comfort. Gigan was barely bigger than him but he was incredibly unyielding, and every inch of him was deadly.

 _A smart move, but you’ll have to be a little rougher than that. Use claws next time._ With a final squeeze Gigan let Daophin go and stood up.

 _I didn’t want to hurt you,_ Daophin said. _We’re just training. It’d be rude of me._

Gigan laughed that scraping laugh again. _I – Thanks. You’re a real Prince, worrying about me like that._

Daophin swelled a little with pride. _Are we going to go again?_ He was sore from getting thrown; Gigan had wanted to get a feel for how much he could do before he started training him, so they’d been sparring for several hours. It was getting late and dark. The cybernetic titan was an incredible fighter, fast and surprisingly light for such a heavy frame. Daophin had a lot to learn.

_If you want to, you’re taking the lead here, your highness._

_I… I think I’m ready to stop now. I should sleep after my flight. Can you teach me how to get out of that neck-lock tomorrow though?_

_Of course, your Highness. Whatever you want._

Daophin settled down. Do you have a cave? A place to sleep?

Gigan shrugged _. I don’t need anywhere to hide, I don’t think anything’s going to try to attack me in the night. I don’t need a lot of rest anyways. You can sleep, though, I’ll watch out for you._ He gestured to the base of the cliff nearby, the overhang where he and Daophin had just met, with a small copse of spiky bushes underneath.

Daophin squinted to see where he was pointing in the dark, then loped over and settled down, Gigan following him and leaning up against the cliff next to him. Daophin tucked his tails around himself and curled his feet up into his belly, trying to curl into a ball.

Gigan looked out to the horizon. His visor cast an eerie red glow that reminded Daophin of his progenitor’s fire. If he closed his eyes and concentrated he could imagine that the minute sounds that Gigan’s armor and internal mechanisms made were the sound of rocks and sparks.

 _What was Ghidorah like again?_ He asked quietly, eyes closed.

A moment of consideration.

_He came from beyond the stars, like a said. He was the only creature of his kind for as long as anyone could remember. He called himself The-One-Who-Was-Many, but the humans called him Ghidorah, and that was the name he took. If you saw him you’d understand why he was meant to be a King. Oh, Daophin, he looked just like you. And he had a righteous heart like you, too. He’d never hurt a friend. He was **loyal**. The most **important** trait of a King. After Rodan pledged his loyalty to him he must’ve fought like a hurricane to keep him safe. How else would your progenitor’ve survived their final battle? _

The ember that’d been so thoroughly crushed in Daophin’s chest started to warm. In his mind’s eye, a golden storm, a protector of the weak. His love for his progenitor that was so powerful that he had protected them from beyond the grave. The last of his kind, so alone until he came to their planet and found a world full of wonderful things to defend. Daophin had a whole _lineage_ that he hadn’t known of until he’d met Gigan. Oh, he owed the titan-mech more than he could say, his sire’s old comrade, his exiled friend who’d pledged his loyalty to him. Finally safe, he felt himself drifting to sleep to the soundtrack of Gigan’s gentle histories.

Gigan watched the young titan nod off, waiting until his breathing subsided.

A spitting image of Ghidorah. No wonder why Godzilla tried to eviscerate him. Rodan got what he deserved, the useless parrot, spawning this soft-hearted halfbreed. Soft-hearted and empty-headed, ignorant of basic biology as well as fighting technique. And social intuition. He whistled a breath. Some parenting you did, Rodan. If Ghidorah saw this creature, he’d tear him apart for having the audacity to imitate him.

But Ghidorah was still annealed to the ground in Boston the last time he heard from him, and his bastard hatchling might prove himself to be useful yet.

All he’d have to do would be to put up with him for a little longer. Beat him around, show him how to bite and throw a few moves, and wait.

And Gigan was very good at waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Known Gay madison russell. who wouldn't have a big mad crush on Elizabeth Ludlow?!?  
> Also everyone who said Gigan was bad news makes me wiggle with glee. He's got plans alright.  
> No word from the rest of the titans yet, but I have all kinds of ideas for them... let me know what you think, what you liked and want to see more of!!!! I am to please (myself and you all!)  
> Also I'd give my life for someone to doodle the Lil Sluggers soccer logo kdjhfjhglfkj


	12. A Second Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> interlude II: King Daophin au  
> all KINDS of character development i was too lazy to build in the min story yet

Their new world was a fiery one. Sometimes when they dreamt they caught flashes of how the world was before; swampy, moist and hot, inhabited only by weak and unintelligible creatures that styled themselves their rivals. The world of his fathers was dominated by two forces: Godzilla and the Hunt. The Hunt was their word for the voice in their sire’s heads telling them to seek out new worlds to destroy, a voice that they were helpless to disobey. The Hunt had led them to this planet and to Godzilla.

The Hunt also spoke to them. It was the voice in the back of their head, not as clear as they dreamed of their sires hearing it, perhaps not a voice but an impulse. If they were faced with a decision, their own mind would tell them to do one thing, the Hunt might tell them to do something else. Unlike their sires, they were not servants of the Hunt, they were not hunting-dogs or slaves to that terrible artificial instinct.

There were times when something especially cruel was required of them, something that turned their stomachs, and in their foremind they knew that they weren’t strong enough to crush and rend the innocent like they needed to. The Hunt could make them such, though. They could gently loose the lead that kept the Hunt tied down and it would spill out of them, out of their eyes and mouths and the glands at the base of their wings, and they were cruel enough to do what had to be done.  Titans, humans, animate and inanimate, the Hunt didn't discriminate. It was a blessing for Daophin, as much as it was a burden for his sire.

Killing King Godzilla didn't require the Hunt, though. Daophin didn't want his final great battle to be fought by something else.  Godzilla fought a good fight. The two of them had razed cities and mountains and scored the earth violently in their dominance battle, and it still crackled and burned around them under a smokedark sky.

He’d decapitated Yon at some point. It was the first time they’d ever lost a head and it had been terrifying, and exquisitely painful for the one head that remained. Yon acknowledged that Shi suffered more than him; he himself’d just known a few moments of bizarre lack-of-body before he burst out of his embryo again, while Shi had to shoulder the burden of piloting a two-mind body, and, for the first time, being truly alone.

After a brief retreat while Yon grew back, Daophin had found the King again. He was re-invigorated by Mothra and roaring with heat and energy, but he was older than he had been when he’d had to fight Ghidorah, and he was battle-weary. His energy blasts were thin and slow. They had given him the mercy of a quick death, swiping him off his feet with their tail while he was trying to charge up and then ripping out his throat. They charred the wound with a burst of flames from their teeth to try to keep it from growing back, just in case. Daophin had been wounded terribly in the fight and would need to heal themselves alone, but they knew that they had to remain for their coronation - that's what Gigan told him, at least.  They’d also spent a few minutes paying respects to the corpse of the King that had felled their sire.  

Shi had also wanted to poke around his body and see where his glow came from. He’d never had a chance to see it up close; he’d always been too worried about getting hit by it. Yon had indulged him, since it would be a while before any of the other titans showed up to pay fealty to him anyway.

 _I guess we’ve got to go be kings now,_ Yon said, sounding doubtful.

Shi took hold of one of the plates on Godzilla’s back in his mouth and shook it. It barely budged, jiggling the lizard-king’s whole spine instead. He let it drop, grimacing at the taste. _It’ll be okay, I think. They just show up, bow and leave, right? There’s no actual administration involved. We’ll go back home or something after that. Do you think Mothra will show up?_

 _Do your really trust her around that?_ Yon asked, nodding at the still-crackling corpse lying against the burning side of one of the mountains that they’d been fighting near. _She’d probably revivify him and we’ll have to do it all over again._

_We should eat it. It’s a waste of good meat, otherwise. We don’t even have to eat the whole thing, just a few important bits so he can’t come back again._

Yon groaned in disgust. _Or he’ll come back missing his arms and he’ll be slagged to salt at us for it and he’ll start chasing us around bleeding out of his stumps. Can you imagine?_

_Gross!_

_And everyone’s going to come see us get scorched and covered in undead goo. Ugh, I hope Mothra stays in whatever hole she lives in and never comes out._

_Don’t say that! She’s clever, and she was nice to us. I like how she smells. I hope she shows up and she isn’t too angry. I like her,_ Shi whined.

 _You can deal with her lectures, then, because I’m sick to death of them,_ Yon grumbled. _It doesn’t matter if she’s angry at us, we’re her King now. Besides, you know how our progenitor got when we asked him about our sire, right? Do you really think she’ll be happy we killed her lizard?_

Shi was quiet.

It wasn’t as if they didn’t share half of their minds with each other. It was – it was hard to explain, was what it was, they were like two different tributaries that fed into the same river. They didn’t need to speak with each other, since they both had the same thoughts, but it was _fun_ and _nice_ to have someone to talk to, even if they had to put up with each other all the time.

Shi admired Yon’s placidity; his brother on his left wasn’t surprised or taken aback by anything. He never let an enemy attack them from behind, but he also never catastrophized or got carried away in his vigilance. That being said, he was also an overcautious ascetic who listened to the Hunt too closely. Yon would never let himself play with human-things, lick rocks or pillow himself on Mothra’s soft furry abdomen like Shi wanted to (he saw those idle desires as they flitted through his brother’s head, and he always made fun of him for them.)

Yon, on the other hand, admired and envied Shi in equal measure for his energy and excitement. Shi was always finding new things to do, new titans to talk to, and new things to be amused by. He’d been the one to approach MUTO and the other titans on their continent and convince them to ignore their King’s battle call when the time came for Daophin to challenge him. If he hadn’t they would have had to face an army of titans, and not even the Sun Prince would have been able to beat them. If it had been Yon alone that Godzilla had tried to kill as a fledgling, he would have found a volcano to curl up in for the rest of his life and he’d probably never find a reason to leave. Shi would never give up on the world like that, though. There was an implicit understanding between Daophin that Shi had committed to their path, and Yon’s job was to help them succeed in it. If Shi’s dream of living outside without fear meant that they had to kill a King in the process, then that was what Daophin would do.

Shi was still tugging at Godzilla’s body. Yon was looking up and around, waiting. They’d roared their victory like they were supposed to after they’d felled the King, as Gigan and the Hunt suggested they do, and now they had to wait for their coronation.

Yon nipped his brother’s horn. _Stop that, it smells like fish._

 _I’m gathering important information,_ Shi responded. _In case something like him shows up again._

They both looked up when they heard wingbeats. The first of their acolytes. Mothra? Quetzalcoatl? Battra, even?

They squared themselves, planting their feet and opening their wings to show off their impressive wingspan. With a ragged breath they unclenched the grip they had on the ember in their chest and they felt the air around them ignite one more time. The spontaneous sheet of fire started from their wingarms and moved down, and it spilled from his mouths like water. He’d tried to make his mouth-fire more impressive, more like Godzilla’s jets of plasma, but it didn’t cooperate. Gigan told him it looked like he was drooling fire and he had to admit that he had a point. The Hunt had insistently told him that he needed to use his _lightning_ , but Daophin didn’t _have_ any lightning except the kind he made while flying, and that still set him on edge. Fire, on the other hand, came naturally.

From over the smoldering mountains, they felt their progenitor before they saw him, a blast of hot, dry wing whistling over them. Their heart sped up, their aching, plasma-scorched wings raised in a glorious crest around them and they sang out to their parent.

Rodan dropped down to them, trailing sparks and dust with him, sailing to his sons’ feet.

 _Daophin!_ He said, barely above a whisper, looking at Godzilla’s body in disbelief. _You…_

Daophin dropped to his wingarms, their flames sputtering out, and wrapped his necks around his progenitor, purring and scenting him. He was still air-wet and warm from their nest and he felt wonderfully familiar. _You came! You didn’t have to come, it’s a long flight._

 _If I’d known you were going to fight Godzilla I would - Fortune’s sake, you should have called for me!_ Rodan snapped. _You could have been killed! I could have – look at me, both of you – I could have lost you. Do you understand? What were you thinking?_

 _It’s alright,_ Shi said affectionately. _We took care of it. You don’t have to worry about us, we’re mostly fine, see? We just need a little while to rest. And now you don’t have to hide on the island anymore if you don’t want to. We’ll take care of you and we can all live together out here without worrying about getting hurt._

Rodan caught sight of the ring of fresh pale scales around Yon’s neck. _You didn’t-!_ he started. Yon winced, ducking down to try to hide behind his brother. _I can’t believe you! You got your - Shi, you got your brother’s head ripped off?And Yon, I expected better from you!_

 _I’m sorry, I know,_ _I grew back. It won’t happen again…_

 _It better not,_ Rodan said. _If I hear that you got into a fight like this again I’m going to come out here again and shake you by your feet._

 _I’m too big for that now,_ Shi interjected, amused. _Besides, I’m apparently a King now. Can’t box my horns or scruff me._

_Is that so, fledge? You wanna bet?_

_Please don’t,_ Yon groaned.

Rodan craned himself up and gently bumped Yon’s new-formed head with his own, nuzzling him as his son leaned down to meet him. What was he going to do with this not-a-fledgling, this wetling Kinglet? Strong enough to kill Godzilla but still so terribly young and soft? He should have raised him harder, Rodan thought. Now he was worried about him getting hurt. The hydra was _already_ hurt, decorated with gruesome war trophies from Godzilla and the titans he’d fought before. He needed to be groomed, Rodan thought, ember clenching.

He looked at Godzilla’s cooling body, scored with deep scratches with mouth-shaped chunks gouged out – Daophin wasn’t as soft as Rodan remembered him. Even the burnt scales he was fussing over were brittle and hard like Ghidorah’s, like a suit of armor.

Daophin purred as his grumbling progenitor groomed him. He was still susceptible to scratches, especially on his back where he himself couldn’t reach. Everywhere that Rodan examined he found a new injury that needed to be tended to. Some of them Rodan could cauterize, others he had to leave to ooze.

 _How are you still alive?_ He asked, shaking his head.

 _Don’t ask me,_ Yon responded.

 _Dumb luck, big lightning, good blood,_ Shi said smugly, wriggling for Rodan to get the best spot at the base of his neck. _It doesn’t hurt that much, it just looks bad._

 _He’s lying,_ Yon said.

_Hey! Don’t make me come over there._

_Daophin!_ Rodan snapped. _That’s no way for a King to behave. Fortune’s sake, you’d better not snipe at each other like that once the rest of the titans show up._ He clapped the side of Shi’s head, just hard enough to sting a little. _You’re going to have to keep order around here, and if you show any weakness someone’s gonna try to take advantage of it. You’ll wake up one day and Scylla’s going to be hanging over you ready to vivisect you. At least try to look like you’re the world’s throne of power or you’ll end up like Godzilla here._

Daophin straightened himself up. He’d hoped that once he was full-grown he’d be past the point of embarrassing his progenitor. Old habits died hard.

 _Someone’s coming_ , Rodan said quickly, drawing back. Daophin heard it too, the soft whistle of wingbeats on top of an unearthly hum. Mothra, Rodan thought, and let himself feel a little sadness for her. The Kings fought for glory, but their mates only reaped tragedy. She played the game, just like Rodan did, and she’d lost like him, too. It served her right; she’d helped take away his mate, and now he’d returned the favor. Ghidorah had made his play even after his death. He felt a little less sad, now that he thought about it; now he felt pride, vindication.

He looked up at Daophin hopefully. This was his moment of glory. He’d taken the world back from the monster that wouldn’t let him live in it. He’d done well by Ghidorah and Rodan. Would he allow the former Queen mercy? He wondered. Or would he destroy her, like Ghidorah would have? The dragon would have wanted a clean end to the coup, with no potential for Mothra’s mischief.

But Daophin wasn’t posing for her like he had before. His wings were down. In his faces, illuminated harshly by the burning mountains, Rodan saw only regret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Its all fun and games until someone dies and mothra shows up to make you feel bad.  
> The Hunt is some combination of Ghidorian genetic memory, instinct and possibly the alien imperative that was implanted in Ghidorah to turn him into a terraforming apocalypse machine (a Phase Sixer?!). Daophin's genetically distinct enough that he isn't completely compelled by it, he's like the 'what do you want? THE SOULS OF THE INNOCENT/a bagel/NO!/two bagels' vine  
> Yon/Shi both apparently mean 'four' in Japanese. I thought the concept was cute, sue me lol. They're all grown up but they're still very very Young.  
> also, do you guys prefer more updates or longer updates? I for one am a validation ho and like doing shorter ones more, but the quality's better when i take more time on it.


	13. Chapter 13

A blink.

This world wasn’t like his own. They couldn’t feel their own weight on their feet on the surface of this alien planet; the air was thin and sulfuric, the glassy ground in front of them a sickly fleshpink. It was all sharp and dry here, even the light from the distant twin stars, unsullied by atmospheric interference. It almost hurt his eyes.

A vague sense of confusion, curiosity. They were surrounded by the shells of a great civilization, it seemed. Great domes and spires smashed like eggs or toppled, riddled with blastholes, slashed as if by some great precise claw. The desiccated skeletons of the former organic inhabitants peppered the grand starbleached roads and vistas. Ghidorah stepped over them with disinterest as he made his way through the city, his tails and wings trailing the chime of falling glass and dislodged rocks behind them.

Someone had beaten him to this planet.

Ichi ground his teeth together, frustrated. His other heads were looking for clues; he was strategizing. It wasn’t as if he cared overmuch, but the thrum from the base of the skull had led him here and they’d spent eons traveling for the promise of destroying something. That was the only time that the alien imperative let them get some peace and quiet.

San clicked his tongue to draw their attention and the other two heads looked down at him. On one side of a vast crystal courtyard were the shattered remains of alien armaments, huge mobile blaster bays the size of Ghidorah’s heads. They’d all been shattered or slapped aside.

One of them seemed to have hit their mark, though; against a shattered mirror spire on the other side of the clearing there was a partially-preserved silhouette of the planet’s attacker, thrown against it by some lucky shot. They saw arms – elbows, at least – some kind of spiky ridges. Bipedal. One head. San sniffed – no scent of lightning or scalemusk. In the broken mirrors they saw only themselves reflected back a million times.

They felt an off-putting wave of disappointment. Ichi shook his head and knocked against the other two; he was sure San was responsible for that, but he couldn’t be sure. Of course it wasn’t going to be another one of us, he thought. Would you really want to have to fight ourselves?

All the same, though, he could understand the sentiment. There might have been someone else like him, traveling the universe alone and breaking it as they went. They just didn’t look like Ghidorah.

Looking at the impressive carnage around them, though – it seemed like their predecessor had done just fine with one head and no lightning. They could imagine the scene, the hundred-years-ago nightmare, the screams and sirens and the glorious sound and smell of death, and at its forefront, some predator worthy of snatching Ghidorah’s kill.

A blink.

No   he hadn’t been worth the consideration     after all

He wasn’t the Wet King but he had knives for hands.

 _Well,_ Ni says.

A blink.

Daophin woke up, tangled in his wings and gasping. He only got snatches of the dream, ones that clung to his mind as he frantically tried to kick them away. The stark quiet of a destroyed city, littered with collapsed mirrored buildings that looked like ancient bones. A ghost city, like a human-nest without the humans in it.

 _Look who’s up_ , Gigan said. _Did you have a bad dream?_

Daophin rubbed one of his noses against the rock to itch it, trying to brush off his panic. The present world returned to him.  _A little one. It happens sometimes._

_Godzilla?_

_… Mm-hm._

Gigan was watching him with mild amusement from the other side of the thicket that Daophin was sleeping in. Did he sleep? Daophin wondered. Surely he did, even if he was half metal and only half flesh. The other titan didn’t look like he’d moved much since Daophin had fallen asleep _._

_I bet. That’s a nightmare of a titan right there, kiddo._

Daophin brushed the sand out of his nose and grimaced, bleary-eyed. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to tell Gigan about his dream. It was like the ones he used to have when he was a wetling, the ones that he forgot as soon as he woke up, except for the deep, wordless emotions and sensations that they conveyed. Frustration, pride, fear. The cracking of bones. Some terrible portent. Now, he felt the lingering veil of confusion.

_Are you ready to start fighting or do you need something to eat?_

_No, I’m fine. I don’t eat,_ Daophin said. _I can, if I want to, but otherwise…_ he gestured to the sky with his heads, with the sun slowly buoying upwards. _I just get energy from around._ He actually didn’t know how he got enough power to live, except that he knew it had to come from somewhere. His progenitor had said that it was the heat from their nest that fanned their embers, and he definitely seemed more energetic when he had time to sleep in their nest, but here Daophin was, surviving outside the caldera anyways.

 _Useful,_ Gigan said, _not having to worry about getting food. Come on, then, the sun’s already risen and you can get all the light that you need to power up. We have a lot to learn and not all that much time. Got to get you out of that neck lock, right?_

Daophin thought of Godzilla. His own helpless flailing. His progenitor. Being thrown by Gigan over and over again until his body screamed rebellion again. He nodded and stood up, shaking off the evening’s dust and joined Gigan. The older titan walked him out to the path of sandy gravel that they’d been wrestling in before. Was this the whole compass of his territory? Daophin wondered. Gigan didn’t look suited to this place. He could imagine his metal joints getting filled with sand, turning white-hot in the direct desert sunlight. It didn’t seem like the mechatitan would be comfortable in a place like this.

 _How did you end up here?_ He asked, before he could think better.

 _Go over to the other side and take a defensive stance,_ Gigan said, gesturing across from himself. _I just ended up here, in the end. Godzilla came for me, too, after he killed Ghidorah. He likes the water, though, so I thought that if I came far enough inland I could avoid him and found this abandoned territory. Like you. Great minds think alike, right?_

Doaphin crouched down, planting his feet hipwide with all his weight on them like Gigan had instructed the day before. _You don’t mind being all alone? And all the sand getting in everything?_

 _It’s not that bad. You can’t beat free territory – besides, I’m not really alone. The humans come and watch me sometimes, and hey, I have you now._ Gigan raised his arms in front of him, protecting his face and preparing to attack. _Now stop changing the subject, your Highness. Try to predict which way I’m going to move, and…_

Several hours later, Daophin had been thrown, wrangled and pinned into submission. Each time he fell Gigan would wait patiently until he got up, then run the same drill, felling him again until Daophin’s first instinct was no longer _flee_ but _fight_. It was slow going, though, since his instinct to run away from trouble was marrow-deep and fierce.

It didn’t make sense to him to stay on the ground and fight someone who couldn’t pursue him if he flew away. That was how he escaped last time; he only got into trouble – he only – they only lost because Daophin had tried to fight back. That had been his mistake.  He didn't want to make it again.

He told Gigan about it, haltingly, after the titan had wrestled his necks into a knot and demanded to know why he wasn’t fighting back harder.

 _That’s no excuse_ , the cybertitan responded. _If you’re going to beat Godzilla, you don’t get a choice whether to fight or not._ He sounded exasperated, and Daophin winced. He knew he was a failure as a fighter, but it always hurt to have it confirmed.

Gigan let him go. _You know what? This isn’t about fighting. You’re clearly capable of it, you’ve got all the physical characteristics of a fighter. This is a problem_ – he poked Daophin on the chest with a blade as he stared down at him through a blazing visor – _with your heart. You don’t have a fighting spirit._

 _I know, I really do. But what do I do about it?_ Daophin asked plaintively.

_First off, stop whining. You’re not winning any points. And stop apologizing and sniveling like you are right now when someone’s not happy with you. A King doesn’t care what people think about him, he does what’s best for himself, and if anyone wants to settle the score with him, they can do it on the battlefield. Got it?_

_Okay, I’m sorry. I mean – oh-_

_Stop. That!_

_Sorry! I mean, no! I’ll say sorry as much as I want! And you can’t make me stop!_

Gigan looked up and sighed. Ghidorah, he thought, wherever in the seven pits you are, there’s no trace of you in this fledgling.

 

* * *

 

“You must be Maddie Russell,” Dr. Farmer said with a thin, ingratiating smile. “Heard so much about you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Madison said warily.

“Rick, won’t you take care of her bags? I don’t know where she’s going to stay, but if you thought she’d be useful you can take care of her. You don’t mind sleeping in the supply truck, do you? You’re such a slip of a girl, aren’t you, Maddie.”

“Madison,” Madison corrected. “Wherever you can fit me in, I’m just, uh, glad I could help.”

Dr. Farmer crossed her arms, still with that thin smile. She must be hot in that sharp blue linen suit, buttoned up to her chin underneath her now-dusty lab coat with her glossy dark hair down, but she didn’t betray it. Stanton, on the other hand, was in a sweat-stained Hawiian shirt and a Monarch jumpsuit with the sleeves off and tied around his waist. Madison hiked her backpack up – Griffin had just left to go back to base, and all that she had with her was her pack and a carry-on size suitcase.

“Thanks, hon. We’ll find some place for you! Emma Russell’s daughter has to have something worthwhile to contribute to this little grant sinkhole of a project,” she laughed, gesturing at the Monarch encampment. A dozen square tents and a few trailers where the equipment and researchers were probably kept; an octahedral mobile structure covered in wires and transmitters; a landing pad for drones and a fleet of jeeps. Beyond that Madison saw the craggy red rocks of the state park set against the afternoon sky, shimmering and sizzling in the heat.

“Why don’t you get yourself set – Hey! Be careful with those!” she called out to a group of military personnel that were in the middle of heaving a wooden crate out of a tarp-covered truck. “Those are _very delicate instruments_!”

Madison and Rick shared a look. Dr. Farmer, she’d found out, had been a colleague of her mother’s, a researcher who went into environmental policy. Unlike her mother, instead of focusing on micro-scale behavior she’d taken on a significantly more statistically complicated task; wrangling governments and research organizations for money for titan study projects. There were plenty of resources for the killing of monsters; not so much for studying them. Madison respected her efforts, since she was the driving force behind funding the mobile camp for tracking Gigan and now Daophin, but that was as far as her affection for Dr. Farmer went.

She did, as Stanton warned her, have a stick up her –

“Where were we? Oh, get yourself settled in. We’ve got some work to do.”

“How is Daophin?” Madison asked. Dr Farmer gave her a look – really?

“Titanus Daophinius is fine,” she said, and brushed Madison’s shoulder with artificial casualness. “You don’t have to worry about him. That information is top secret, you won’t be working with it. I know you’re probably used to having unfettered access to Monarch reports, but-“ she sighed. “You’re a minor, you’re not a government worker, and the only thing keeping you from leaking critically important confidential information is a few pieces of barely-binding contract paper. You’re here to help analyze data right now. Any other information is going to have to be off-limits.”

Madison pursed her lips. “I know more about him than anyone else here,” she said, pitching her voice softly, not as affronted as she felt.

“I know, sweetie, but we’re on government property right now. They’re lending us some time to research before they try the oxygen destroyer on Daophinius. He’s too much of a threat to the country otherwise, and everything has to be completely up to spec.”

“The O2 destroyer?” Madison hissed. “They can’t!”

“As they’ve already demonstrated, they can,” Stanton interjected.

“I know, I know, it’s such overkill.” Dr. Farmer cracked her knuckles. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to get all the data and samples we can for now, though. All hands on deck. Everything above board. You understand, right?”

Madison nodded, copying the Korean-Midwesterner’s knife slash of a smile.

The doctor pointed at Rick. “You get her set up. Standing meeting at 5:30.”

“Right,” he said, the two of them watching as she turned on her heel and stalked across the ruddy dirt in a determined beeline towards the boxes that the military attaché was unloading.

Rick sighed and looped his fingers in the beltloops of his jeans. “How’s it going?”

“Kinda bullshit.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s like she said, they have to follow protocol,” Madison said stiffly. True, if Dr. Stanton hadn’t stepped down he would’ve been able to let her do whatever she wanted. But that wasn’t what she was here to do – she would do whatever was necessary to be able to stay close to her titans. Godzilla was untraceable most of the time, circling deep beneath the Pacific now that his underwater den had been obliterated; Mothra kept to the Yunnan province unless Godzilla made landfall elsewhere and she joined him. Then there was Daophin, who, despite her best efforts not to, she couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for.

She missed Serizawa and Dr. Graham. They shared her admiration for titans, and their benevolent negligence gave their researchers ample opportunity to explore what they wanted to. And then Mom… Mom had always encouraged her to explore but in the end she had always been right behind her, her hand on Madison’s shoulder, gently pushing her in the direction that she wanted her to go. Madison was free to study whatever she wanted, go wherever she liked, as long as it aligned with Dr. Russell’s interests.

“ _I’m_ glad you’re here, at least,” Dr. Stanton said, clapping her on the shoulder. “I got you a key card to get into the intel tents. We snuck in and got you Archivist access on them too, you can’t write anything on them but you can read anything you want to.” He pulled out a plain white plastic card from his pants pocket, enclosed in a ziploc bag. “Don’t tell Dr. F that I gave it to you. I could use your help, though, and I’m not gonna run this project with one hand behind my back.”

Madison took it and grinned at him. Dr. Stanton, always pulling for her if it meant less responsibility. “Thanks, Stanton. I knew you’d help me out.”

“I’m not going to get between a girl and her titan,” he said, shrugging and smiling. “I don’t know anything about this titan, and nobody else does, either. Farmer just hates that we need you.”

She kept smiling; he nodded at her suitcase. “Now come on, let’s stake you a tent.”

  

* * *

  

From underneath the water, several thousand rocky and ravaged miles away, some rough beast slouches towards the coast to be born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOOHOO tfcon was such a blast! Here's an unexpectedly mild chapter to help me get my writing juices flowing. Gigan's mentorship. Dr. Pharma sans chainsawhands. Unintended consequences.  
> Next chapter: A little fast-forward. Elephant graveyard? We'll see.


	14. Chapter 14

The days had started taking on a reliably repetitive quality.

Every day he woke up to the same vista. The ruddy rocks stretching out to the craggy horizon, dotted with brush, set against a stark blue sky. The dusty, still air. The occasional and distant sound of humans, jetting around just at the periphery of his ability to hear them.

He’d wake up with the sunrise to Gigan returning from whatever he did in his evenings, they’d train at fighting all day, and then once he was aching and battle-tired Daophin would rest at the mechatitan’s feet. There was no better balm for his scratched scales and bruised body than the older titan's raconteuring. It took a little prompting and bothering but once he was in the proper mood for it Gigan revealed a wealth of brilliant stories, tales of the things he saw on other worlds, recollections of the early days of their planet.

_There were more of us in those days. When I first got here you couldn’t go a hundred miles without running into a warren or clan. There were enough of us to move in packs, hunting together if we needed to hunt, fighting each other when we wanted to fight._

_Were they all different kinds of titans, or were there whole families?_ Daophin asked. He thought of a clan of his progenitors lighting up the sky with fire as they flew together. What a thought!  He knew his progenitor had told him that his species usually lived alone, but the idea still thrilled him. 

 _Families, sometimes, but also just a whole lot of titans in general. Wings, tentacles, fur, scales, two feet, ten feet, no feet… It was a different time,_ Gigan said thoughtfully. _After a few million years of flying through space without anybody to talk to, Ghidorah and I really got a chance to settle down and meet the neighbors when we arrived. He couldn’t speak the language very well, so it was a good thing I was around to translate._

_How did he and my progenitor meet…? Do you know?_

_Nah, I wasn’t there for it. I’m sure they knew about each other, but I hadn’t seen King Ghidorah since he got driven to the far reaches during his last battle with Godzilla._ He patted one of Daophin’s heads with the flat of his blade. _I’m sure however they ended up getting together was…. Dramatic._

Daophin thought about his progenitor and King Ghidorah circling through a churning sky together. Ghidorah was an unknown figure in his mind; vaguely, he envisioned some creature like himself, but bigger. Three heads, he’d been told, but he couldn’t quite imagine how they would act, how they would move. Did they all act in unison or did they have minds of his own? Did they have spines like him? Were his movements as he flew quick and decisive like his progenitor’s, or slow and sinuous? He looked up with one head and tried to imagine King Ghidorah in the late afternoon sky, squinting, envisioning gold (he’d been told that there was gold. He’d never seen Gold before, but apparently it was the color of the sun, and he liked the idea of something that shiny and brilliant being wearable.)

Daophin stirred. Thinking about flying had stoked the air-hunger in his chest. He hadn’t had a good, long flight since he had arrived – Gigan had urged him not to, saying that if he was going to train to fight on the ground than he needed to stay on the ground – but the song in the back of his hindbrain, the itch in his nose from the hot groundair, made it harder and harder to follow his trainer’s orders. The ember in his chest was flaring and crackling and he needed cool air and open space to bat it back down again.

Gigan saw him rustling his wings and looking upwards and he batted him with a blade again. _Don’t think about it, kid._

 _Just a little flight_ , Daophin said. _My progenitor told me that I needed to practice if I wanted to stay strong, and I don’t want to waste away and have to learn to fly all over again._

_I think you’ve done enough flying for a lifetime. And your progenitor’s not around. Those two facts are connected, you know._

A wrench in his ember. Daophin looked down sharply.

 _Just stay with me, I’ll keep an eye out for you. We don’t know which other titans are wandering around just beyond those cliffs. Don’t want you getting into any trouble,_ Gigan said. _Don’t worry about anything else. We’ll go out and hunt Godzilla together once you’re ready._

Daophin nodded. Of course. Gigan was looking out for him; he was too small and weak and dumb to fend for himself in a world that was ruled by strength and violence. If he tried he’d probably get Gigan killed somehow, too, since Fortune seemed bent on punishing others for him having the audacity to try to make his own decisions.

He should be thankful for the other titan’s efforts; his mentor was forging him into a different form. He could feel it, slowly, the metamorphosis. When Gigan tried to hit him now, he could sometimes actually dodge, and earlier that day he had actually knocked the mechatitan off of his feet with a lucky kick. He was getting stronger, too; his legs were thicker, his necks more muscular, even his scales felt like they were growing in thicker as the old, leathery ones fell out, replaced by surprisingly hard and vaguely metallic plates that _shhhhh_ -ed against each other when he walked. He’d never paid much attention to his tails, but they, too, were opening up like strange desert flowers, sprouting little spiky nubs from the flat plates that they terminated in.

He felt like an alien in his changing body, just like his sire had been an alien to their world when he arrived. He was trying to learn how to move, but even as he fought with Gigan, running drills over and over, his center of mass was changing, his internal parameters shifting as he evolved. It was off-putting, a little embarrassing, and grotesquely fascinating.

 _I’m going to go look around then,_ Daophin said, finally, getting up. _I’m restless. Maybe the humans are doing something interesting._

 _When are th –_ Gigan stopped himself. Daophin didn’t like having his fascination with the little bugs insulted; he took to sulking. _Have fun, stay safe. Give ‘em my regards._

 _‘Course,_ Daophin said with a little smile. He was starting to talk like Gigan, too, losing his lilting, rough accent in favor of Gigan’s flat, short and machine-like tone.

Would your progenitor recognize you now? He wondered. Would he be proud of you?

He walked out, past their cliffs, down through the rubble and brush and boulders. The human-nests were this way, just beyond a ridge of rocks. He’d seen them once when he’d come this way looking for Gigan early one morning, a collection of laughably small dwellings that looked like he could blow them over with a strong breath. He watched them, and he knew that they were watching him – for what purpose he didn’t know. Maybe they took inspiration from titans to build their nests, their winged-things and their rolling-things and their little fires. They didn’t seem very creative, and they needed all the extra protection they could get.

Something interesting caught one head’s attention – a strange, unnatural smell in an otherwise uniformly musty palette of senses.

That head ducked down to sniff at a rock nearby, just about claw-full size, just like all the other rocks. He nudged it.

There was a bright whirr, the sound of something small and sharp flapping, and something darted out from behind the rock into the air, jumping out at him.

Daophin yelped and jumped back and stumbled over one of his tails. The human-thing, which had made its nest behind the rock, flung itself into the sky. It was like the ones that used to buzz around their nest back home, small and agile, humming. It tilted towards the distant patch of human-nests, then veered away from it.

Daophin watched it. Hunt it, he thought suddenly, with that internal attention that all carnivorous beasts have when they see prey flee. He watched it rise up, already out of head-reach and getting further away – he remembered chasing them before he could really fly yet, they were always too fast for him and too high. He looked behind him, back beyond the cliffs where he knew Gigan was waiting for him.

What did the titan have against flying, anyway? Was he just jealous that he couldn’t? Daophin certainly would be; Fortune had seen fit to deprive him of the gift of flight and he was being so surly about it as to try to keep Daophin from indulging in it. No, not indulgence – flight was a natural part of a flying-titan’s life, as essential as swimming, for a water-titan, or walking on dry land, for ones like Gigan. His mentor didn’t understand that, of course, but Daophin was the expect of flight-framed creatures. And he was supposed to be King, right? That’s what he’d told him; and Kings didn’t take orders from anybody, even terrifying looking mechatitan godfathers.

So he kicked off with surprisingly powerful legs and followed the drone into the sky, hearing the cascade of dust and rocks below that were tossed back by his wingbeats. He was on it in under a minute, even though it had a head start – he was fast, now, and strong. He banked upwards and grabbed it in one claw, bobbing in the air to keep his heads out of the way. It made a satisfying crunch as he gripped it and he kept flying upwards, exuberant. From here he could see the whole human nest to one side; all around them was craggy, beautiful desert. Maybe when he was done killing Godzilla he could come back and stay around here – Gigan wouldn’t mind, he was only living here because nobody else was. Daophin would let him stay wherever he liked.

He kept flying. If Gigan was going to be angry at him either way, he should at least take advantage of the chance to get some exercise.

He flew off towards the far cliffs, a few miles at most, but by the time he passed them the air was starting to get warm and wet and clouds were rolling off of the front edges of his wings. The humans would be getting a little shower tonight. He hoped Gigan wouldn’t get rusty. He slowed down and drifted down to the cliffs to take a break, hoping that the clouds would dissipate while he rested. The storms were annoying – how did his sire get anything done when he trailed a hurricane after himself all the time? He landed and immediately took to examining his catch, smelling it, peering at its sparkly, crunchy components. It tasted dusty and burnt-sour.

After a few minutes, he let it drop from under his claws. Whatever force it had been imbued with to make it fly had been extinguished, and he felt a little clutch of sadness in his chest. It hadn’t done anything to him and he’d killed it. Feeling reproachful, he pushed it off of the other side of the cliff and listened to it hit the ground and skitter.

That was an interesting sound. Let’s try throwing something else off, one head suggested. Just to see what happens.

It’ll fall. What a surprise, his other head thought.

He frowned, cocking his heads. That was strange. He looked at himself again, head to head, eyes to eyes. Yes, he was still one titan, albeit with a double-set of everything from the shoulders up. How bizarre.

One head looked down over the edge of the cliff where it’d pushed the crumpled drone. A thicket of strange, whiteish shapes lay at the base of the cliff. Were those trees down there? Strange rocks? He cocked a head; the other head joined, too, for a better look, and he crouched down. They were great arcing pieces, whatever they were.  A variety of interesting shapes. Daophin jumped off of the cliff and skittered down, churning his wings to slow down as he clattered into the pile. Whatever they were there was a whole collection of them, wood-light and starkly colored against the dirt. He grabbed one long piece in his mouth, feeling its heft and tasting its strange muskiness.

Throwing it aside, he started nosing through the rest of them. Pieces of rubble fell from some of them, and they all had a uniform color and strange taste and smell. How strange! Were these human-things? No, they seemed too natural for that.

He picked up a broad, flat piece and stared at it. It was rounded, symmetrical, about the size of his head, with holes and caverns through it, and surprisingly lightweight. He let it drop and kept rummaging. If he found a good piece he’d take it back to Gigan.

One head was in the dirt now, fascinated. The other was up, looking around. _Something’s coming_ , the latter thought. The sound of massive footsteps was distant, but coming closer. Gigan, probably.

The other head looked up form the ground and found himself staring into –

Into the eye sockets of a skull.

Daophin screeched and fell back against the piles of bones, which clattered and crunched underneath him. He hissed in inarticulate fear and disgust as he scrambled to the base of the cliff. They were _bones_ , it was a thicket of bones, titan bones piled up like a little killing-field in the middle of the desert!

He gagged. He’d _licked_ them!

The skull was on its side now, unmistakably animal. It had a beak, he noticed, horrified. It was the same size as his progenitor’s head, or thereabouts, and it had the same points at the back. He stared at it, at its great gaping eye-pits, and at the broad, clean crack directly between them, as if something had split it perfectly in two like a geode. His stomach lurched and tightened. I’m going to be sick, he thought, feeling acid heat in his stomach and his throats. I’m going to be sick, I feel like my ember’s about to burst into wetrock and slither through my insides –

He looked around frantically at the bones surrounding him. The big round one he’d been considering must be a hip, the curved, spiked ones were ribs. A tiny, delicate wing, fledgling-sized; an armory of disembodied claws. So many of them, he saw, had the same marks as the skull, precise and terrible gouges that no claw could have made. It must have been a whole clan of titans, felled and dragged here, or perhaps trapped at the bottom of the cliff and massacred.

His vision narrowed with panic and fear. He’d killed them all. Titans like his progenitor, massacred.

The sound of footsteps. A pressure in the back of his throats, hot, choking him.

 _Told you you shouldn’t be out and about,_ Gigan said, his voice mellow and flat. _You could’ve gotten hurt over here – look at all of this. It’s disgusting, no fledgling needs to see this. It’ll give you bad dreams._

 _You did this,_ Daophin managed. It wasn’t a question. There were other titans like his progenitor, but only one like Gigan, an interloper like his sire had been. Nobody else could have left marks like this, not even the humans at their most fearsome.

 _I – Of course I did,_ Gigan said. _This roaming pack showed up after I’d been here for a while and then tried to drive me out, but I –_ he gestured with one terrifying appendage – _fought ‘em off. This is only some of them, the rest of them flew on. Maybe Rodan was one of them, I don’t know. I took the rest down here so I wouldn’t have to see them every time I walked around._

 _My progenitor said that his kind never travelled in packs,_ Daophin said. He couldn’t look at Gigan; his whole body felt like a live wire, like a hot boil of wetrock about to explode. _These ones must have all died at different times, they showed up here and wanted to settle down and you killed them, and then you told me that you hadn’t._

It was true, he knew with sudden and terrible clarity. This land hadn’t been uninhabited at all.

Gigan was silent for a long moment. Daophin looked up at him, but the mechatitan’s face was unreadable as always. Impassive and ominous.

 _Aw, kid, come on._ _Things happen. We all do things that we’re ashamed of. I killed a few titans here and there. You killed your father and ran away. We all make mistakes, but it’s what we do afterwards that matters, right? I took on my old friend’s orphan to raise, and you’re going to_ _hunt Godzilla down and kill him once and for all, right? We’re gonna make good?_

He felt like something was constricting his necks. He couldn’t breathe, everything felt too hot, too much, the empty skull sockets staring dumbly at him, Gigan wading through the field of bones with his blades flashing, still talking, backing him against the cliffs, pinning him like the skeletons, and wouldn’t it be practical that Gigan wouldn’t have to move his body once he killed him, he was already right on top of his stash of _victims_ -

Whatever was boiling up in his stomach and his neck reached its critical point.

Daophin screamed.

Fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOOAGH... FINALLY THE PLOT ADVANCES... GIGANAWAY........ AND THE SKELETONS IN HIS CLOSET.......... LION KING MOODS.. Give Daophin a Reliable Father Figure 2k19  
> Also @ that one commenter.. if you want me to update... a real comment will be 10000% more effective than demanding it... i have a 7-7 job and med school to prepare for... i am updating out of spite  
> Next chapter: we test my action-writing mettle. the usual cast in unsual circumstances. a kidnapping, kind of?


	15. Chapter 15

Today marked the first month that Madison had spent in Big Bend, after leaving Isla de Mara in the tracks of a half-dead titan. School started in a few weeks, her last year of high school, and she knew in a vague and hypothetical sense that she’d have to get her plane ticket back to the states some time.

Mark’d insisted on it. They’d had a huge argument about it a week ago.

_You have to go back to school. You’ll be able to do whatever you want when you graduate, but you still have one more year, Maddie._

_No, I really don’t, I figured it out. I can get my GER and work here. This stuff is too important for me to leave right now._

_Too important? Your future is important, Maddie. Monarch can wait, but your life can’t._

_Bullshit, my high school career can wait as long as it needs to. Uncle Max didn’t finish high school._

_Yeah, because he got accepted into MIT, and – no, we’re not having an argument about this, Maddie. I need you to come home. I... I need you here, I miss you. I know that I haven’t been around a lot, but I can’t be there for you if you’re in a different time zone. Portland’s a really nice city, I think you’d like it, and the high school there is-_

She’d sort of tuned out after that.

She’d asked Rick for help, but he’d shot back that he ‘wasn’t gonna get involved in her family business again.’ The last time the Russells had an argument it literally brought about the end of the world, and even though she internally rolled her eyes at his cowardice she couldn’t blame him.

To her surprise, though, Dr. Farmer stepped in. After a few weeks of putting Madison on menial intern duties – mostly sitting around trying to stay cool in the 100-degree heat and helping manage the scheduling conflicts between the military, the parks department and the monarch research team – Dr. Farmer had offered to ‘have whatever paperwork it is you need’ filed to keep her in Texas. Madison was surprised; she didn’t think that there was any love lost between her and the research manager, who had yet to even give her permission to look at the data they’d collected on their two resident titans.

That hadn’t meant that she hadn’t looked, naturally. She was a rogue scientist’s daughter and she had an access card with permissions to all the files in the observation tent, and access to Dr. Farmer’s schedule so she could see when the doctor was busy with meetings.

Despite her perpetual cold shoulder, though, Dr. Farmer had offered to help.

“You’re the only person who’s trained on our office protocol now,” she’d said as she clipped between tents, Madison trailing behind her. “We’ve got too much going on to spare you for the moment. If your _father’s_ giving you trouble, I’ll give him a call. Didn’t Rick do it? Don’t he and your dad know each other?”

“He’s not really my supervisor, so it would mean more coming from you…”

“He didn’t want to. Typical. Men.” She waved her hand without looking at her. “Give me his number and I’ll talk some sense into him. Send me a schedule invite.”

Madison watched her stride into the army encampment, demarcated with a hastily-erected chain link fence (unless the feral scientists tried to break in?) with astounding confidence for someone dressed in kitten heels in the middle of the desert.

Huh. She popped her knuckles and went to find Rick.

The sonographer was in the half-circle observation tent with the handful of other Monarch scientists who braved the dark and sweltering heat inside. He had the Ark set up here, pulling data from the floating data drive to compare to the information that they were collecting at Big Bend, when he wasn’t in his top-secret classified standing meetings with Dr. Farmer. No matter how much Madison needled him, he refused to tell her what they talked about – he’d get a strange sort of look whenever she brought it up and told her that it wasn’t anything that pertained to her.

She hated being told that.

Right now, though, Rick, and the rest of the researchers were crowded around one of the drone screens mounted in the half-dome. The remote ambient meters were buzzing and something was beeping. Nobody noticed her coming in, unzipping the entry flap and peeking inside the dark, womblike room.

“What’s going on?” She asked, pitching her voice quietly. “Rick?”

One of the junior researchers tapped Stanton on the shoulder and pointed at her. His glasses were pushed back and he shot her a look of vague concern. He gestured for her to come over and she let herself in all the way, moving through the half-dozen other Monarch scientists to look at the screen.

“Geiger readings are up.” One of the geoanthrologists noted, looking at the meter mounted next to the screen. “Don’t like where this is going.”

“What’s going on?” She asked Rick. The whole place smelled like sweat; the atmosphere was like a tightly stretched gutstring.

“What’s the status on the drone self-repair? You think we can get a visual?” Rick asked, and the junior researcher typing furiously at a tablet beneath the screen looked up at him. The screen itself, which they were all looking at intensely, was a wash of static with only the bare suggestion of shapes on it.

“I think that we should go ahead and get D-02 on the scene if we can. It’s in quadrant XV and it can be there in five minutes.”

“Has someone called Dr. Farmer?”

“Yeah, her phone’s off though.”

“She’s in a meeting,” Madison said helpfully. “What happened?”

Rick popped his knuckles and nodded towards the screen. “We had some titan action. Daophin lifted off 20 minutes ago and took out one of our observation drones. He dropped it wherever he landed and we haven’t gotten any visual input from it yet, but it looks like something’s going down. Weird vocalization readings and vitals. There’s a deposit of titan skeletons where he dropped the drone and we don’t know if he’s found it yet.”

“Gigan’s tracker is closing in on the location,” one of the other researchers said. “Also, hey, kid, are you approved to see this information?”

“Yes,” Rick, Madison and half of the researchers present said.

“Oh.”

“I think we have visual back,” the technician on the tablet said quickly. “I rerouted the visual feed to the older subsystem that didn’t get reprogrammed last time it went in for repairs, so – nevermind, not that interesting – alright, heeeeere we go-“ she clicked and looked up on the screen expectantly.

The static paused, and then suddenly snapped into clarity. The assembled team turned their heads, trying to figure out what the perspective was – the top quarter of the monitor was a dark brown swatch of dirt, and the background was a collection of jagged silhouettes. Another tablet click and the image righted itself. The drone was lying upside down in the dirt.

“Any chance of moving it?” Rick asked hopefully.

“I don’t think so, but I’ll work on it.”

The drone was jostling softly, bumping up and down.

Suddenly, Daophin burst into view, backing up on his hind legs. Everything about him screamed _fear_ , the arched-back necks, the stiffened spines along his jaw, the flared wings and wide slit-pupil eyes. He was scrambling backwards through the nest of bones until he couldn’t go back any farther. His heads drew back like a cobra, baring his fangs.

“Someone get stats on Gigan,” Rick barked. “We’re blind here. What’s going on?”

“Gigan’s there and his vitals are up,” someone said. “Both of theirs are. Radiation, heartbeat, heat signature.”

“Maddie, check their biostats,” he ordered. She nodded and darted behind him to an unoccupied computer terminal and clicked through to the ex-ORCA sensor program, the screen suddenly ablaze with moving graphs. Daophin’s she knew well by now, the unusually narrow sine wave with its characteristic peaks; the second had to be Gigan’s, and a quick reference to the files she’d saved under someone else’s ID confirmed that he was off baseline.

“What are you doing,” she murmured to herself, zooming in on the intersection between the two. Without more information she wouldn’t be able to tell exactly what was going on, but it looked terribly reminiscent of the data collected from titan dominance battles, the same erratic clusters and intensity dips. Maybe if either of them were more similar to the rest of the titans on Earth she’d be able to get a better idea, but –

“Daophin’s in trouble,” she said to Rick. “It looks like they’re about to-“

On the screen over their heads, where Gigan had just come into the frame, Daophin’s body jerked upwards and he roared out a silent jet of fire.

“What the fuck!” Someone yelled.

“That’s _wicked_ ,” said another.

“Oh my God.” “Gigan’s _toast_.”

“Lin, please tell me we have D-02 here, jesus,” Rick barked. The room was devolving into soccer-match style pandemonium. “And someone get Dr. Farmer!”

“I’m calling her right now,” the biostratographer behind him said.

Madison watched with mounting horror as Daophin choked, the stream of flames that he’d disgorged pouring out of his mouth, seemingly against his will. His pupils were slits, barely visible in the grainy camera. Like when he first learned to fly, terrified, his body rebelling against his commands in grotesque ways.

Gigan burst back into the frame. He’d been blackened – if that wasn’t the bad camera angle – all down his front, but his bladelike appendages were still intact. He crouched a few dozen meters from Daophin, waiting for the hydra to finish vomiting fire, and then he uncoiled himself like a spring and leapt at him.

Madison knew the raw facts about Gigan. She knew that the titan was another alien, that he’d killed titans before, and that the government was trying its best to keep his existence a secret. She also knew his exact physical specifications, the physical abilities that he’d demonstrated, the foreign metal from his plating, the speed and strength, and the weight that he would tip the scales in his favor in a fight with an untrained adolescent like Daophin. She had a statistician’s idea of how badly this fight would end.

“Fuck,” Rick whispered. He knew, too.

The second monitor sputtered into view – the second drone that Rick had called up was swooping in to circle the two titans at the base of the plateau like some National Geographic shoot.

“We’re recording this, right?” The technician asked. Her voice was terrifyingly excited.

“Hell yeah. We’ve got the dissection kit prepped and everything,” another said. “As soon as the area is cleared and we get the go-ahead we’ll roll out.”

“I doubt you’ll even have to do the dissection yourself,” the geostratographer said, amused. “Titan D ‘s going to get split from nose to tail.”

"Think we could pitch this to WWE?"

Madison listened to their discussion in horror. Rick was on his portable keyboard, slamming down keys ferociously. On the screens, Daophin was cowering at the base of the cliff, fending off Gigan’s heavy blows. With each hit a slice of blood blossomed from his wings, which he was trying to use to shield himself, folding in like a paper lantern. Fragile.

He wasn’t going to win this one. She knew, with a terrible clarity. Godzilla was a lucky escape, but a one-on-one against a walking bioweapon? He didn’t have a chance.

Fuck, she thought. Then, before she was able to have any second thoughts, she was on her way out the door. Getting a jeep this time would be harder, since they were on a military base and she didn’t technically have access to them, but she could hotwire one of the ones that Monarch used to collect beacons. The supply tent that she slept next to had an unguarded crate of Percussive Grenades that she’d scoped out the first night she’d been there, along with the usual survival tools, and she’d been sneaking them out into her bag over the past few weeks. Just in case. And now Just in case was Now.

“Maddie, where are you going?” Rick asked, grabbing onto the collar of her windbreaker as she left. She spun around fiercely.

“I’m not standing here and listen to you all joke about him getting killed,” she hissed. “I’m going to go actually do something. You all make me sick.”

“I can’t let you do that. You know that, it’s too dangerous.” In her peripheral vision she saw movement on the screen and she bounced on her feet, feeling acid anger in her stomach, in her blood.

“You don’t have to let me do anything. I’m doing it, and you can help me or you can get out of the way. I don’t care.” She knew how laughable it would sound, a slight 17 year old girl against a middle-aged man and, oh, a whole military base. But she had a proven track record of doing the impossible. She was Madison-goddamn-Russell and she wasn’t going to let a child die because nobody else in a _fully equipped military base_ could be bothered to do something about it.

Rick set his jaw. “What are you going to do, huh? Drive up to them and _mediate_? Shoot a 50 ton robot bird with a flare gun? Ask them nicely? If there was something that we could do, do you think I wouldn’t be doing it?” he hissed.

“Like you care.  And I’ll figure it out once I’m there,” she growled.

“It’ll be over by the time you get there, they’re a mile away, at least.”

She grabbed his hand, gritted her teeth. “Please, Rick.” Then, “Remember Godzilla.”

He stopped. She saw her opportunity.

She pulled her jacket free from his grip. From the screen, a rousing cheer from the scientists, like someone had scored a goal. She felt ill, her skin clammy despite the stifling heat. Bolting away from Stanton, still undecided, she strode out of the tent, through the door that she’d left unzipped, and out into camp.

And ran straight into Dr. Farmer, who was on her way in.

“Maddie,” she said, her tone sharp, as she grabbed Madison by the shoulders. “What’s going on?”

“Daophinius and Gigan are having a territory fight,” Rick said, ducking out of the tent, too. “We’re going to follow them and investigate.”

“No, you’re absolutely not,” Dr. Farmer said, shooting him a sharp glare. “We can’t risk the data. No interference.”

“Data? Two titans are killing each other right now and if we don’t step in they’re going to succeed,” Madison said. “I was there for Boston and LA, I know that humans can intervene in titan fights. Even distracting Gigan with signal flares would be enough, but if we want to save Daophin we don’t have much time!”

Dr. Farmer’s grip on her shoulders tightened. “Oh, Maddie. I’m sorry, the other little titan doesn’t have a chance no matter what we do. And that’s what’s supposed to happen," she said with purposeful slowness despite her evident hurry.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the natural order. You know. You, of course, Emma Russell’s daughter. The natural world is vicious, a real dog-eat-dog kind of battlefield. If we humans want any chance of protecting ourselves against titans like these, we need to think like one, fight like one… and if we have a way to work with one of them to protect our interests? That’s when things can get really interesting.”

“Who are you talking about? Gigan? They can’t understand you, Farmer, they’re titans,” Madison said, jabbing a finger at Dr. Farmer. “You can’t work with them. The best thing we can do is try to survive them. And help out the good ones when you can.” She thought of Godzilla, the destruction he’d left in his wake while he fought his own battles, divorced completely from human concerns. You might as well try to reason with a hurricane or fight the sunrise.

Dr. Farmer smiled at her, a condescending and hasty thing. “Rick didn’t sneak you access to that project, did he? Hm. At least he followed some of my directions.”

Madison looked at Stanton. He sighed and stuck his hands into his pockets, resolutely not meeting her eyes. Dr. Farmer’s nails were digging into her shoulder now.

“Come on, Dr. Farmer, let her go.”

Dr. Farmer didn’t; she still kept an iron grip on Madison’s shoulder, as if she was afraid that she’d bolt at any second. “Alright now, let’s forget about all of this and let Dr. Stanton get back to his work. Rick? Richard?”

“Dr. Farmer!” Someone in the tent called. “You have to come see this!”

Stanton stood his ground. “You can’t activate the project without me,” he said warily. “I’m the only sonographer who knows how to use the ORCA.”

Cast in the hot midafternoon light, Stanton and Dr. Farmer stared at each other. Stanton, in front of the tent entrance, Dr. Farmer, gently clenching and unclenching her hands. From the distant mesa, the sounds of collisions and monstrous roars. Madison tasted blood in her mouth, every cell in her body screaming for her to run to them, to do something, to do anything, vividly painting the image of Daophin’s flayed body in her mind. The ORCA – LA – Boston – the desert – the rain at Fenway - everything was blending together.

"Rick?" Madison asked. The ORCA. Destroyed, along with its blueprints. As it should have been, since no man was meant to talk with titans. Unless it was rebuilt. She'd never seen its corpse. "You didn't."

“Dr. Stanton,” Dr. Farmer said coolly. “Let’s go.”

“Maddie’s right. We shouldn’t let Gigan kill him, too.”

“He’s a killer, sweetheart, that’s what he does. It’s _alright._ It’s part of the _plan_.”

“No, it isn’t. We almost let Godzilla get beaten to a pulp, and the guy was on our side. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let it happen again, okay? The project can still go forward without anything happening to Titanus Doaphinius.”

“I’m going to give you one chance to shut up, get in that tent and do your job, Stanton, or I’ll hit you with so many legal suits you’ll drown in your fucking flask before next week.”

The ground was rumbling as the two argued. Madison looked across the mesa. “Oh, shit,” she whispered. Maybe she wouldn’t need a jeep after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter would have had more titan content (and more actual plot events) but I got on a roll writing Comrade Madison and I couldn't stop... we stan a titan-saving ICON! (RICK STANTON 2020!!!!)  
> Also, look at how long Daophin's been holding his own! a whole scene and he's not dead yet! he's gonna be fine!/s  
> Your comments give me absolute life and i love every one of you... as always, feedback, concrit, likes and dislikes are always welcome!!!  
> Did some misc art on my tumblr, if you want to see how I imagine Daophin: https://fauvester.tumblr.com/tagged/fauveart
> 
> Next chapter: Daophin; a kidnapping, sort of; directed by Michael Bay; the kids aren't alright (can you tell my chapter predictions are really just What I Hope To Cover next Time But Will Probably Get Too Distracted To?)


	16. Chapter 16

Gigan moved so quickly Daophin almost didn’t have time to defend himself. His first instinct was to protect his necks and his head, throwing up his wings around his body. His new scales were a little harder than they were when he was a fledgling, compared to the delicate skin of his faces; he could probably live without wings, if he needed to.

He was still gagging, his mouth burning, burning-hot acrid smoke still filling his nose and throat, and then he felt the jarring thud of impact against his wingbones.

He threw his wingarms out. Weeks of training gave him a pretty good idea of what Gigan’s opening salvo would be, since he’d been the victim of an attack-from-above many times before. Snapping his wings out just in time gave him a chance to parry Gigan’s blades for a half second – not well enough to avoid a swathe of scales and skin peeled off the edge of his wingbone with a screech of metal.

Pain ripped through him and he screeched, punching the air to keep Gigan back. A blaze of blood and warmth. Nausea.

 _Leave me alone! Please!_ Daophin hissed plaintively.

Gigan didn’t respond, gathering himself up. His alien face was impassive as always. He jumped forward again, feinting high before dropping low to Daophin’s stomach, clattering through the bones around them. Daophin was backed against the bottom of the cliff; there was no way to escape, no way to fly with so little room to take off. Trapped between a rock and Gigan.

He fell for the feint, too, too confused and scared to think ahead, and he barely flung his wings around himself quickly enough to protect his soft stomach from another gash. His wings weren’t so lucky, though.

Gigan wedged his blades between Daophin’s arms and flung his whole weight against them, trying to pry them apart to get to the titan inside them.

 _C’mon, kid_ , he hissed. _Don’t make this hard for me. It’s not like I – ghh – want to do this._

The pain almost didn’t register, even though Daophin could feel the blades cutting through scales down to scrape bone. His eyes met Gigan’s visor, close, now, enough to see the glowing circuitry running behind it. The mechatitan could see the fear in his own eyes.

Daophin snapped at him before he had time to think again, one of his heads lurching forward without warning and fastening itself at the bridge of Gigan’s beak. The screech of teeth scraping against metal – he pushed Gigan back like his mouth was a battering ram, shaking him, forcing him to let go.

 _They don’t do it,_ he hissed from his other head.

He had been scared. Scared of the bones, and then terrified of the sick, noxious burning inside of him, so unlike the warm and familiar ember that his progenitor had had. Was this what it felt like to Rodan, fire-sick, acid and alien? Was this what Godzilla felt like when he threw up his light-jets? The heat that should have scorched his mouth, that his brain told him would destroy his sensitive flesh, but that didn’t? His own body hideously turning against him with no warning or explanation?

He _was_ scared. Scared and alone and… and angry. And hurt, that he’d trusted Gigan, a killer of titans, a liar, a fledgling-murderer. That someone could play at affection and then turn so quickly and easily. He’d never felt anger like this before, not when Gigan told him about Godzilla’s reign of terror, and not even when his progenitor had been torn out of the air in front of him. Then, it had just been the fear. But now something in his chest, the same place where the terrible fire had come from, was making itself known. A righteous fury.

Where did this come from? He wondered as he ground his teeth down at Gigan’s visor. A flash of blades as the mechatitan fought back, cursing at him. He barely felt it – the scaly spines on his neck were bonier than the rest of him, and had less blood and nerves running through them. He could afford to lose a few.

The fire was growing inside of him, fanned by his internal monologue. How dare he lie to me? How could he do that to Ghidorah’s son, the prince of this world? Then, a horrible thought; was he even telling the truth about King Ghidorah or was he just telling me stories?

He sprung forward off his feet, using his superior size to bowl Gigan over like he’d done when they first started training. The two rolled across the rocky, bony ground, snapping and screeching. Gigan grabbed his other head, the one not trying to shred his face, and brute-forced it under his arm, against his blade in a fierce headlock.

That, Daophin thought, was a bad move.

He should know better by now…

Using the technique that Gigan himself had taught him he let go of his face with one head before slamming it into the titan’s neck and throwing his whole body to the side in a dusty barrel roll. Through one head’s eye he saw a flash of steel, the other tasted metal and blood, and his head was ripped free of Gigan’s grasp as he dragged the other titan to the ground with him _. Stay on the ground, that’s where your power is_ , Gigan had told him while they trained. _The higher you go the harder you’ll hit the floor when someone takes you down. So aim low._

Gigan was screeching – laughing, Daophin realized, through his haze of adrenaline. _There we go, you lil’ lizard! Look at you!_

 _Shut up!_ He hissed through his free head, the one that wasn’t trying to rend mechanical head from body.

In a flash of speed and unnatural strength Gigan rolled with Daophin, flipping and pinning him against the ground, now on top of him even with one of Daophin’s heads still grabbing him around the neckplate. He was too heavily armored, he realized, for him to do any real damage. Where were his weak spots? Why didn’t he pay more attention to them while he was training!

A creak and an unfamiliar grinding noise from above him. While Gigan hacked away at one head, Daophin saw the serrated spines on the mechatitan’s chest start to move. Were they receding? No, they were spinning, slowly but getting faster, glinting in the sun. Oh, Fortune, he thought.

He tried to roll but he was pinned, one wing trapped underneath him from his roll, Gigan with one foot planted on the other, the spinning blade on his stomach picking up speed, going from a groaning grinding noise to a painfully high pitched screech.

_This’ll hurt me more than it hurts you._

Don’t you dare, Daophin thought. The fear had receded now; all that remained was anger, bereft of any color of betrayal or self-pity.

Gigan leaned forward to pin him, his now-exposed chest, the heart beating and the ember burning beneath it.

No. If his life was going to be taken, it’d be for something worth more than this liar. If Daophin was going to die, he wanted to take something down with him. His mouths filled with a burst of saliva, tacky from adrenaline and exertion, and he felt the burn of bile in his throats again. This time he knew what would happen, though, and he didn’t try to gag as a jet of flames burst out of his mouths, one disgorging them through the cracks in Gigan’s neckplates, the other aimed at his face. He exhaled, feeling the warmth in his chest grow and spread from his chest to the broad muscles in his shoulders with his breath, like it was fanned by massive bellows.

Gigan roared and drew back. He wondered if the flames hurt him or just surprised him, but he took the spare second he had to kick his legs up and grab the mech by the hip plates with his claws. The saw on Gigan’s chest squealed when it met one of them and he didn’t have a chance to register the pain when part of a thumbclaw was shaved off, flying like shrapnel. While Gigan tried to beat back the waterfall of fire Daophin rolled up, freeing his bleeding wings and flaring them outwards. With a powerful wingstroke he snapped himself upwards, his whole body jolting from the competing pull of wings and the pull of Gigan’s weight.

 _The higher you go the harder you’ll hit the floor when someone takes you down,_ Gigan had taught him. One head, the one not still attached to the other titan, looked up as he surged upward. He couldn’t get airborn, Gigan was too heavy, dragging behind him kicking and cursing.

His feet were getting sliced; he couldn’t feel the pain through the anger and the energy but he felt the dull thwack of blades. The two titans tumbled together as Daophin was dragged down, grinding Gigan against the desert as he tried to fly, spines and scales and blood trailing behind them. They were gathering speed; Daophin slammed Gigan down as he tried to fly, crunching him down even as he tried to crawl up to Daophin and gouge his blades into him.

This is where real claws might come in handy, Gigan, Daophin sneered internally.

He didn’t realize he was dragging them straight to the human-nest-ands until they were almost on them, and one of his heads saw the big white shape looming just a wingstroke ahead, surrounded by those tiny little dwellings and human-machines. If they were trying to protect themselves it wasn’t enough for either titan to even notice, and at this point the two of them were _right on top of them_.

Daophin threw Gigan to the side, letting go of his neck and pushing him as hard as he could with his (oh, Fortune, they were barely in one piece) feet. He barely had time to brace himself as he crashed into one of the rows of tiny swellings, scattering them like they were nothing, trying to avoid destroying the entire nest. He pulled himself up and saw Gigan rolling to his feet, scorched and coolly furious. He looked around him and saw the partly-destroyed settlement, and the humans running around like little bugs around him. Did he crush any of them? He’d tried to avoid as many as he could, oh, he was so sorry-

There, down by his other head, the one that had been fastened to Gigan and gotten the brunt of his attempts to stab at him. There was a human there, standing, planted on the ground and looking right into the yellow titan eye in front of her.

They all look the same, his progenitor had said dismissively. Go watch your pet people, Gigan, laughing. See if they’ll build a gun big enough to hurt you.

Somewhere deep in his atavistic memory, like a different life or a vague dream, he thought he remembered this human. This was the one from the mountain who always watched him; this was the one standing in the arena in the rain, who sang the fierce alpha-song, screaming at him, barely louder than a whisper but bafflingly brave.

She was halfway into one of the little rolling metal-boxes, one foot hanging out. The other human inside was doing something, perhaps trying to communicate with her, and she was watching him, close enough to his head to touch him. Her flat fleshy face looked cool and determined despite the chaos unfolding around her.

A **bangCRACK** rang out behind him and he turned away just in time to avoid some kind of explosion from Gigan’s direction, followed by human shouts, and then a volley of weaponry. Both titans were getting attacked as the humans recovered from their initial shock. When Daophin looked up he saw one of their tubelike machines being ratcheted upwards, aiming at him; behind that, Gigan was getting to his feet again, his visor sparking.

 _Enough of this, you little licksplit,_ Gigan growled as he prepared himself to rush Daophin again. _This is getting real boring._

Daophin started to answer, but several thigns happened in unison. One, Gigan lunged at him, a final sortie. Two, the fire-spitting machine that the humans were leveling athim went off. Three, the same percussive **BANG** from before ignited right between the two titans, right beside the metalbox with his human in it. Daophin’s vision in one head, and his ears in both, blinked and disappeared with a stab of sudden pain. He must have screamed, but he didn’t recall.

For a second he was completely blind and deaf, dumb to the world around him as he staggered. But one head could still see; he saw Gigan blown off his feet by the human contraptions. He saw the metalbox in front of him flipping, suspended in the air like time was frozen, fire and debris blooming behind it like a little volcano. He felt his heartbeat pounding in his popped ears. The humans were weak, soft… that was why they had to build their metal machines, to protect themselves from fire and rocks. They would not survive this.

Before he knew what he was doing, he had the metalbox in one claw, trying not to crush it but gripping it hard enough to dent and crunch. The world was muffled and swimming with pinpricks of light – everything hurt, his head pounded, the anger in his ember was suddenly suspended like the metalbox, like it was held up by its neck in a death grip.

He spread his shredded wings, and with a limp-hop to avoid crushing the metalbox, he took off. A staccato _poppoppop_ rang out behind him, the sound of more explosions, noises, human screaming, then Gigan yelling up at him, but he soon outpaced them all as he rose.

His blinded head was shaking, nauseous in its blindness; his one good one was too terrified to look behind him. Get above the clouds, his progenitor was telling him, where they can’t see you.

So here he was. He had fled his first home; he had fled his second.

This time, though, he had fought as well as his would-be killer.

And he – oh. He thought as he flexed his claw, remembering that he’d forgotten to put down the human metalbox that he had caught. Was his human okay? Did it get crushed or fall out or – how hot could humans get anyways? He knew they burnt, but how badly? He didn’t have time to think too hard about it. The familiar, ominous sense of an impending storm was hitting him and he pulled his claws closer to his belly as he flew, hoping to shield whatever it was he was holding, metalbox and human, metalbox alone, metalbox and human corpse. He could land once he got out of Gigan’s range, rest a little until his senses were restored, and then he could worry about his quarry. After that – he’d figure out what happened after that later. Couldn’t worry about it right now.

Again, and with renewed urgency, he flew.

 

* * *

 

Madison uncurled herself from the back of the Jeep. She was bodily shivering, trembling even as she maneuvered her legs over the divider into the front seat, her hands shaking as she slowly hooked her fingers around the door handle. It almost felt like the time she’d crashed on Isla de Mara, except so, so much worse.

The military truck was dented down the middle with the imprint of huge triphyrangeal claws; it smoked, the front axles a foot off the ground like a crushed soda can, against the flat plane of rocks. It was evening now. They’d been flying for hours, Madison curled up in the back seat, listening to the roar of wings and the crack of thunder. Small mercy they weren’t struck by lightning and she didn’t get wet, and a bigger mercy that she hadn’t been crushed or blown up.

She’d played it over in her mind during those hours, the few seconds between the concussive grenade going off and the actual grenade being detonated. She’d been hanging out of the Jeep, Rick yelling at her to get in the cab when she’d turned and seen one of Daophin’s heads within arm’s reach of her where it’d fallen when he fell on them. He’d blinked his secondary eyelid, transluscent, wiping blood off his glassy lens like windshield wipers, and then the world around her exploded into fire and firearms.

Rick must have fallen out the other side of the Jeep just as she jumped into it and splayed over the divider, and then the whole van was slammed down and up again and her stomach dropped like an airplane was taking off. It’d taken a few seconds for her to realize what was going on and she’d jumped up, ready to leap down to the ground.

When she looked down out of the van, though, the ground was surging downward dizzyingly, two stories, five, and then she’d lost her chance. The Monarch camp below was flaming, the tents collapsed, and the army forces were trying to muster an attack on Gigan. And Daophin was escaping; and she was caught in his grasp.

When she looked out of the Jeep, once they’d gotten to cruising altitude, she only had a chance to see the ground passing underneath them before it turned dark and cloudy, and then she’d gone back in. She’d had the wind knocked out of her by the gear shift when she’d jumped over her seat and her ears were ringing from the percussive grenade. Her body didn’t protest when she curled up in the back seat and dry-heaved.

Rick was probably dead. Dr. Farmer, too, and everybody else who was at the Big Bend base. For all she knew, she was, too.

When they landed Daophin had let the Jeep drop with surprising gentleness, pressing it down on the ground with elaborate slowness. He’d then taken a few steps, shook his wings out, and collapsed onto the ground.

Madison looked at him – his immense spiny back was turned to her, all that was visible except for his shoulders and one of his whiplike tails. He was steaming quietly, she could hear the gentle hiss as the last of the air’s moisture boiled off. Behind him in the blue and otherwise lovely dusk, there were mountains; they were at the border of a little rocky river, a riverbed of little stones and shells, with trees in the distance. The rocks crunched under her feet as she stepped down, slowly, in case she’d broken anything she didn’t realize yet.

In the background, beyond the trees, she thought she could hear the whine of a highway. Up on the mountains there were dots of light, maybe telephone poles or houses.

And the rasp of Daophin’s breathing.

She took a few steps. Everything seemed to be working, except for the jitters. _Calm yourself down,_ she thought angrily. _This definitely isn’t the worst condition you’ve been in._

She made her way down to the riverbed; it was maybe twenty feet across, more like a creek than anything else. She kneeled, her knees protesting, and drank from her hands. Chemicals, mud, cold water. She splashed it in her face and forced herself to take a breath before she turned around.

A hundred feet away or so, Daophin was watching her.

It was the same head, she could tell from the one horn that was sliced through halfway, crusted over with dried blood. The other head was tucked underneath his scratched wing, cocooned and hidden. She wondered again if they were different people, the two heads, or two parts of the same whole.

Madison should be scared right now, she knew. She’d been kidnapped by an unpredictable titan with a proclivity for disregarding human life. But Daophin slowly closed his eyelid, catlike, and sighed with a little whining noise, and all she could think about was Andrew lying in the rubble somewhere, broken and dying alone.

She held out a hand and walked towards him, slowly but purposefully, keeping eye contact with him when he opened it half-way again.

“Hey,” she called out. She could feel the warmth radiating off of him; he smelled like burning and musk. He closed his eye – it looked like he was battling to keep it open. Madison edged closer to the cable-car sized head.

He breathed out through his shout and her jacket flew back like she was behind a jet engine and she barked out a laugh. The yellow eye peeked out at her again, and she reached out, hand shaking, to rest it against his cheek, right in front of his eye where he could see her. Each scale was bigger than a dinner plate, slightly grooved like a shell, the color of copper piping. It was warm to the touch, but not too hot. Strangely metallic. She let her fingers brush it, and then, bolder, pressed her whole hand against it.

“Hey there, D,” she said. “It’s ok.”

Another whining exhale.

“I’m sorry. It really sucks, I know. It’ll be okay though. I’m okay. We’re gonna be okay.” She stroked him with a full sweep of her arm, like she was petting the side of a toasty metal horse, and when she lifted it back up her hand was coated in dark red.

Daophin’s eyes were closed. Madison leaned in and pressed herself against his cheek, feeling the thrum of life in him with her whole body, his warmth through her wet cheek.

They’d be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DABS AAAAAAA okay yall dont judge my stabby writing skills. Rick's okay i pwomise, he just got a bit knocked around. I'M NOT GONNA KILL MY MAN.  
> Smash that mfing like button if you too would like to be gently carried to safety by a dazed, confused flying lizardbird.  
> I also don't know why these chaps are all clocking in so much longer than usual.. as always let me know what you liked, what you'd like to see, ideas, recs etc!!! i LOVE your comments, i get up early every day to read them and it gives me the energy to get thru my work day!
> 
> Next chapter: a change of scenery. Meanwhile, on Every Atom...


	17. Chapter 17

She had been unhatched when the fledgling first came into the world; that was why she wasn’t able to spread the news of his birth. That brief flare and the shift in the fabric of the universe went unnoticed. In her embryonic state, curled up in her soft egg while her body and mind were re-acquainted, she only vaguely registered the pluck of the strings of the world that she kept her mind-fingers on.

She could always feel these things more acutely when she emerged from her cocoon. Then, in her winged form, she had full command of her Understanding; she could feel all the great tugs and pulls on the web of the world like a spider feeling for something caught in its net. When Ghidorah had ripped himself into consciousness she felt it like the ground dropping out from underneath her, even before she’d fully re-formed and gained wings, and she’d immediately known to cloister herself and grow so that she would be strong enough to protect Godzilla and their world.

After she had left her old body – bloodied by Rodan, immolated by Ghidorah – suspended in the air, the Understanding got muddled while she regrew. It took time. Every time she came back the Understanding got keener, but when she was just a collection of elements and thoughts suspended in amniotic gel, there was no conscious mind to use it yet. She had emerged years later, round and wriggling in a lush foreign forest, and she had spent a little while growing and resting. She was not needed right now; she assumed that the Understanding would let her know if she was.

Their new world was so full it was harder to keep track of everybody in it than it had been when it was just her, Godzilla, the Mutos and the humans. It took even longer for her to re-acquaint herself with it, quietly meditating, trying to tease out whose mind was whose, and where all of those minds were. In the fringes of her Understanding she got impressions of the others and could tell who was who, who was where. Sometimes she could even find out what they were doing, if they felt strongly enough, if their minds were tuned to the right frequency.

It took work, though; energy that she should have spent returning to her flying-form. A delicate balance.

Godzilla, she had felt right away. He was like a beacon in the Understanding, weighty and impossible to miss. Her mind brushed his and she felt a firm, warm nudge, and he felt her abject relief that he was still there. He knew she would seek him out when she was strong enough, but he was impatient as always.

She could imagine him saying – _HEY THERE, GORGEOUS, YOU GET YOUR BEAUTY SLEEP?_ with that roguish look in his eye.

Ghidorah was conspicuously absent from the Understanding when she hatched. She hoped that it meant that he was absent from their world, too, although he was sometimes hidden from her inner eye. Of course, Godzilla would tell her all about their battle when they met again. She assumed he’d won, since he was still alive.

Taking stock over the months she named all the titans she could feel and that she knew, memorizing the feel of them for future reference. Sometimes through the Understanding she felt their anger or pain, sometimes their pleasure and affection, as if she were feeling a flicker of it too. The world had seemed placid after Ghidorah, for the most part. Everything returned to its natural state.

Then – a few years after her hatching – she felt the web of understanding snap and shiver like a bowstring, like someone had reached through her chest and grabbed her sternum and yanked.

She’d fallen off of the little hill she had been resting on and rolled down, then lay at the bottom, curled up around herself, straining her mind to find out what happened.

It felt like pain and tasted like panic.

There was too much going on in one place for her to tease out what was going on. She felt Godzilla there, Rodan, muddled together, a frisson of anger and violent fear. A simple dominance fight would not have provoked that kind of Understanding, though; it was too strong and weighty for that. The movements were muddled together, like someone plucking the strings of the web over and over again.

She had focused on it for a while, a few days, trying to figure out what was happening. As a grub it took her a little longer to work these things out.

The newling priestesses found her while she was lying there; she heard their quiet song, even though she was too busy to acknowledge them. They petted her nose and made their gentle noises at her. It would be a little while until they grew up and learned how to really help her untangle the Understanding like their older sisters did, but having them there was a comfort.

And then, at last.

It was not just Godzilla and Rodan. She had not understood at first, but she felt the unmistakable shift of another titan wading through the understanding, messing up the ripples that the other two were making.

They were scared, whoever it was; she tasted it when she tried to touch his sputtering presence in the Understanding. It was not Rodan, who was there, too, although muted and silent, or Godzilla, who was illegible.

This new creature she could see less clearly than she should have been able to, and he felt, in her mind, he felt too much like the False King.

Had he not been killed? Had Godzilla failed in his duty for the first time since Mothra had known him?

No, it couldn’t be. She concentrated, poising herself over that thin filament of Understanding that the new titan was walking on, so she could catch every movement and sign. It was not powerful enough for Ghidorah, even if he were injured; his movements felt different. But any creature like Ghidorah could be dangerous, and not being able to talk to Godzilla about it made her nervous. She had always been torn between being a quiet and solitary observer of the world, the priestess of the Understanding, and being an active Queen, shaping that invisible web herself – in this case she had to put aside her worries about the natural order of things for her King and for the world.

Their world was a violent one, and mostly because all titans were fundamental strangers to one another. They spoke the same language but none of them ever talked to each other about the things that really mattered. Her Understanding was a gift, she knew, but also a tool that she needed to use to make up for their failings.

After hurried consideration – the priestesses hugged close to her while she thought – she spun her cocoon. It was early. Normally she would spend as much of her time as a worm as she did fully grown, so she could commune with the creatures of the Earth as well as those that lived in the air. It wasn’t healthy for her to spend so many lives plunging right into her final evolution, the noon-day sun of her life cycle, without decades of proper, humbling foundation.

In the cocoon, though, she could feel the Understanding better than she could as an egg; returning to the same suspension of particles, rearranging herself, changing and growing, turning over, she could still keep her antennae tuned to the world outside.

Godzilla, alive, not happy but not in pain.

Rodan, alive, in pain, exquisite.

Other titans, too, some which she could name, some that she could not.

But she ignored these. She tried to focus on the Newthing. Sometimes she could catch an impression of it; there was an overwhelming sense of grief about it, lostness and fear. It felt young and soft to her, and brittle.

But it also felt like Ghidorah, and that was why she had to find it.

It might kill her again, incinerate her, like she had the briefest memory of it having done during her last cycle. Wild with the grief that she could only get a faint taste of. But as soon as she found it she could warn Godzilla; keep him away if the threat was too great, and take care of it herself if not. Was it too much to hope that she wouldn’t have to hurt someone else?

Rodan. She shuddered and turned in her watery cocoon. _I’m sorry, my old friend._

In the Understanding she’d find him again when she was done, and she would let him lay down the guilt that she knew he felt. All wounds healed eventually, even the ones traded between old allies. Once her body was done being stitched together she’d find the newling creature and she’d find Rodan and Godzilla and she’d make everything right again, she’d… she’d…

She’d fix everything…

* * *

Had she not been so preoccupied, she would have felt a deeper and alien footstep on the margins of the Understanding. Like something climbing to its feet, slowly putting itself together, emerging from Nothing into Something, and taking notice of her.

* * *

 

From a minor non-Monarch marine research facility near the Gulf of Mexico: “Huh. Weird. Hey, Jeff, come look at this weird fuckin’ crab.”

* * *

 

Further away in the Atlantic, Godzilla was sulking. No – Godzilla didn’t sulk. He’d been known to grumble, to retreat and take stock, and to plan angrily, but he was usually too blunt to let any business go unsettled. Don’t go back to the ocean angry if you can help it, that was his philosophy.

He was just conflicted, and none of the conflicting emotions that he felt were really good. He hated to admit it, but he didn’t really know what to do.

The other titan, the Ghidorah-spawn and fake princeling, had retreated across the bay and deep inland where he couldn’t follow. Wherever they were they hadn’t made any alpha call that would let Godzilla track them. _Coward._ Well, maybe not, he was still pretty fresh from the looks of him. Godzilla wondered how old he was, if he was going to get any bigger. Little bastard, he’d show up and cause trouble as soon as he could, knowing who his sire was.

Godzilla kicked and spun silently through the water, enjoying the feeling of its coolness slipping past him. Yeah, he wasn’t built for chasing some monster through the desert. Besides, he didn’t want to go into a fight like that without knowing what his enemy was capable of. Ghidorah, he knew; if he showed up Godzilla wouldn’t have a problem piledriving him into the nearest block of ice like he did last time. Gigan he could take on, easy. But he’d never seen this one before. It could bring down storms like Ghidorah, but it hadn’t used the False King’s lightning strikes.

Maybe Rodan could tell him… No, he couldn’t face the pteradon again. The last time he’d seen him the erratic titan was spluttering off the coast of the island. He’d dropped him to chase the hydra with no regard to what condition he’d left Rodan in. Had he still been alive? He had to have been. He couldn’t have killed him. If he wasn’t dead – if he’d lived, but was somehow hideously crippled – Godzilla’d rather not think about it. True, it was his duty and his right as the King to keep his kingdom in line, but Rodan wasn’t just a subject; Rodan was, by rite of his age and his unusual sociability, sort of… sort of a friend. His swimbladder turned as he thought about it.

His _friend_ had created a monster, a False Prince, a facsimile of the only titan to ever have hurt Godzilla so badly. How? Why? Was this his long game, to take over his throne by birthing a fledgling to fight in his place?

What had Godzilla done wrong with Rodan?

He was near land now, he could taste the sand and silt he was churning up in the water as he swam over it. Judging by the direction it’d gone in, the new Ghidorah was heading towards Gigan’s territory, maybe further beyond if it was lucky enough to avoid the malevolent mechatitan. If they teamed up – mmgh, he didn’t want to think about that, heh. Godzilla could take Gigan easily enough now, but fending off his vicious attacks while also trying to defend himself from an aerial assault? That would be a real challenge. He might not come out of that one in one piece.

His feet sank into the soft, pebbly seafloor and he stood up, his head and shoulders breaching the surface of the ocean. The first lungful of night air was sweet and cool, just like the water pouring off of him.

 _MOTHRA?_ He thought. Maybe he should think louder. He concentrated and imagined yelling. _MOTHRA!_

No answer. He’d felt her before, brushing her furry little mind against his, giving him a taste of her relief and concern before she’d withdrawn again. That had been weeks ago though, and he hadn’t heard or felt anything from his Queen since then. Part of him wanted to chase after the usurper, but he also knew that he’d never be able to catch him on land. He couldn’t fly, and he had no way to find and follow it. It’d be useless.

There was someone else who could find it, though.

Mothra talked a big game about staying out of politics, but Ghidorah had killed her the last time; not only that, he'd tried to turn the world order upside down. He would have done more than kill if he'd succeeded, he would obliterate.  She would help him find the spawn.

He waited, listening to the water and the distant chop-chop-chop of boats. No response, not in his ears or in his mind. He huffed.

_YOU BETTER BE GETTIN’ YOUR WINGS, YOUR HIGHNESS, ‘CAUSE THIS NEXT ONE CAN FLY AND I NEED ALL THE HELP I CAN GET._

He sniffed the air. Something didn’t feel right in the water, here. The waters around Rodan’s island had felt wrong, too; it still tasted like it had when the water had exploded and inverted during his fight with Ghidorah. Stale and dead. He shuddered.

_DON’T TRY TO THINK TOO HARD ABOUT IT, CHAMP. YOU’RE STILL IN ONE PIECE._

The titan waded up onto shore, his feet sinking into the swampy ground. He looked around; Mothra’s new nesting-grounds were swampy and forested, stinking of rotting plants and rich dirt. It squelched up between his feet as he walked, following where he remembered her speaking from. If he caused enough trouble she’d show up eventually to give him a lecture about how important everyone else’s lives were, too. It was a surefire way of getting her out of her hiding place.

Mothra liked caves and little holes that she could hide in when she was a grub, so he decided to head for the hilly parts of the land, battling through the thickets of knee-high scrub plants that lined the water’s edge, crashing through rotting logs and estuary trees. The simmering wet heat permeated every wrinkle and hole on his body. It stank, not just of mud but also like that strange stale smell from before. Why didn’t Mothra ever find a nice little deserted rock in the middle of the ocean to re-hatch on?

He stopped, listened. Something didn’t feel right. He cocked his massive head, listening. There was nothing out of the ordinary that he could hear.

Actually, there was nothing at all. No bugs. No animal noises. Just the gentle slosh of ocean water behind him and his own breath.

Deathly silent. On the island of a Goddess of Life.

Something was wrong.

 _MOTHRA?_ He roared, looking around, starting to get a little worried. It was so early in her life cycle. She might not have prepared an egg to hatch if anything happened to her. Salt’s sake, he’d felt her reach out to him only a few weeks ago, a blink of an eye in the life of a titan.  What could have happened to her in that time? She was small and practically invisible unless you knew where to find her.

Around him, at his feet, he suddenly noticed the broken branches and downed trees already laid out ahead of him. There was the corpse of some little furry animal floating in the brackish shallow water by his claw, but there were no flies buzzing around it. He had not been the first visitor from the ocean.

 _MOTHRA!_ And he tramped out towards the distant hills where he could only assume – and hope – his Queen was waiting for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can update my smoochy monster fanfiction from the downtown bus! i love the 21st century!!! this is also my last day at my lab before I leave for Med School.. No more 3 hour commutes. I'll try to keep up with this the best I can, but I doubt updates will be as frequent :'(  
> Some of yall are gonna be happy.... I AINT killing our man Rodan.  
> I'm also confirmed Mothzilla trash. yw. mothra has a savior complex. zilla needs to find his chill.


End file.
